Over 50's, how did you accumulate your wealth?

jerrysimon

fred246 wrote: »

Avoid all Apple products.

As an IT manager I used PCs and and Android phones for ages. However after rebuilding my PC every year and chasing virus and my phones only lasting a couple of years, I now own an iMac/iPhone and all my family have iPhones. We facetime and share photos (new grandchild) with each other, it just works.

In my experience whilst these products are expensive (if you settle for a lower/older iPhone they are cheaper) they last much longer and dont need as much maintenance. My iMac was purchased through Uni discount as was my Mac Mini, now 8 years old.

OldBeanz

jerrysimon wrote: »

As an IT manager I used PCs and and Android phones for ages. However after rebuilding my PC every year and chasing virus and my phones only lasting a couple of years, I now own an iMac/iPhone and all my family have iPhones. We facetime and share photos (new grandchild) with each other, it just works.

In my experience whilst these products are expensive (if you settle for a lower/older iPhone they are cheaper) they last much longer and dont need as much maintenance. My iMac was purchased through Uni discount as was my Mac Mini, now 8 years old.

I tried to move to Android and thought how useful there is an app which mimics your Apple phone keyboard. You then have to read the small print and it warns you that the app may not be secure - so it was offering to take total control of the phone. One diary, one set of notes - with Jerry on this, after a life of running computer systems, Apple does the work and I have binned my 10TB RAID 10 home network. Ultimate bottom line was the wife did not like Android .

jerrysimon

Yep my wife finds it easy to use her iPhone and thuse simlar across all Mac devices. Likewise one shared diary that appears on all our divices.

Still have a Synology NAS, though I doubt I will ever replace it. Also binned all my DVDs and CDs as everything is streamed thus less clutter for the house. Sorry off topic!

qwert_yuiop

It hasn't happened to me, and won't, but most wealth is still acquired the traditional way - daddy leaves it to you. Take a look at the Sunday times rich list - the aristocracy feature highly on it, certainly not through hard work or talent.

MallyGirl

I was lucky to have a mother who understood the value of a decent education (a scholarship girl herself) so grammar school led to uni led to a job in IT.
I bought my first flat at 24 for £44k at 14% interest- sadly sold it for £36k some years later. Next house was joint with then boyfriend- a doer upper which we paid £165k for. Did a lot of work on it and sold 8 years later for £415k with mortgage paid off. Next house was £615k but now seems to be worth approx £1m with £40k left to pay on the mortgage.
We will downsize and move west once we don't need to live in the Thames Valley for work.
We do like nice cars and nice food, we put our daughter through independent primary school but now she is at a grammar. We expect to help her through Uni - bare minimum would be to top up the maintenance loan to what she'd get if we weren't high earners. There have been some nice holidays but these days it is usually a city break plus a week somewhere nice and outdoorsy in the UK.
1 redundancy each plus a small inheritance have knocked a bit off the mortgage. We are now 50 and aim to retire at 60 with a combo of S&S ISAs and pension pots at around £1.5m plus the house.
We have always paid into pensions, him more than me when we only had personal ones, so I am now catching up with some big AVCs because my pot is quite a bit short of his. We still have a flexible mortgage so it doesn't matter that I have dropped my salary so much to put into the pension.

reeac

Bought a big, shabby house in a posh area in late 1976 ... it was just within reach financially but we bought it to get into desired school catchment area. Friends thought we were mad. Renovated it, mostly DIY, and sold it when we retired 22 years later for 11 times purchase price and it's now worth just under £1M. With hindsight we should have kept it and rented it out. Such property gains are probably not possible nowadays.

qwert_yuiop

reeac wrote: »

Bought a big, shabby house in a posh area in late 1976 ... it was just within reach financially but we bought it to get into desired school catchment area. Friends thought we were mad. Renovated it, mostly DIY, and sold it when we retired 22 years later for 11 times purchase price and it's now worth just under £1M. With hindsight we should have kept it and rented it out. Such property gains are probably not possible nowadays.

Born at the right time. Me too - member of the very last cohort to get paid to go to university. What a leg up in life.

ams25

Start investing as early as you can.
I started investing in shares before I was 20 (thanks dad). Only small amounts and had winners and losers but got me into investing mindset early.
I started putting 10-20% of my salary into PEPs (predecessor of the ISA) when I started earning (lived at home for a while on low rent which helped). This was predominately into funds, which I researched so ended up with some good ones. E.g. Woodford in 1993.
took out a dc/ private pension at about 22. Even though it was Equitable life which cost me later and I only made contributions to it for 6 or 7 years...I kept it invested and has turned into a decent 6 figure sum today....30 yrs later. (Now transfered into my SIPP)
Lucky enough to get into a decent DB Scheme with new job from mid 90s.... Will be c. 40% of income from 60.
Decent job and salary from mid 20s, with frequent promotions/pay rises. But worked hard/ with high stress and poor work life balance for many years. (I did enjoy it loads in 20s and 30s, declined in 40s and not so much in 50s..hence stopped)
Always tracked spending to keep it under control. Had treats and nice things but liked to feel I had earned them...and pay from savings
Avoided debt except mortage. Overpaid mortgage
Kept saving / investing until I stopped work...maxed out pension tax relief, ISA allowances etc
Always money savvy (er careful!). Hate overpaying but don't mind paying if value for money.
Marriage and kids later so already established....started saving for kids before I had them! (Maybe I'm just weird!)

atush

First part of our wealth came in property. We built our home, ie converted a barn. On completion it was worth about double what we put into it.

When we sell it, we will be able to buy a 3 bed home/bungalow for half of what it is worth (conservatively). Also have a gite in fRance bought for the price of a second hand car, and put about 20K into it. Worth more than double what we put into it. Will sell in the next few years i think. Own a home in america, where we will spend 5-6 months a year (ie winter) when Oh retires. i spend at least 2 months per year there now. Worth a bit mroe than we paid for it in USD, and a fair amount more than what we paid (as it was 2:1 when we bought it) in GBP.

Second, pensions.

Third- investments. Started with saving 50/month as it was all that was spare with 3 very small children. Ramped it up over the years and used some of it to put 3 boys through Uni. Both of these have been invested monthly from salary, so went up slowly at first and now largely. Have had ups and downs (well up overall), but our losses during the financial crisis were recovered by 2009 mostly.

smallish inheritances, x2.

Saved cash in regular savers on top of monthly investments. Have used this money to buy last 3/4 cars instead of car loans.

Income has grown hugely in last few years.

Spreadsheetman

qwert_yuiop wrote: »

Born at the right time. Me too - member of the very last cohort to get paid to go to university. What a leg up in life.

It's a point, but it was a good investment by the government at the time. I have paid a higher amount of tax / NI over my working life since then in return for that opportunity so we both won.