What can I improve?

colinbest2

Hey Alex,

Yes to both counts! 7.5% is the highest my employer will go and I am also currently on a salary sacrifice scheme.

I have been looking into S&S ISAS are am quite interested in them, I'm just not too sure where they fit in with my current situation. Split some money off that would go into my savings account and put that into a S&S ISA perhaps?

Alexland

S&S ISAs are useful for long term investing towards the education of children or retirement before an age where you can access a pension. A S&S LISA provides similar benefit to basic rate salary sacrifice pension contributions and can be useful for lump sum expenses from the age of 60+

Novice_investor101

I'm 10 years older than you & I use a stocks & shares LISA & ISA to dump all my not needed disposable income into.
My cash emergency fund is now built up & it would be silly to hold any more cash in savings accounts that don't keep up with inflation. & I can always access the money in the s/s ISA if I really needed to - ordinarily, I don't touch it.

The only thing is, I wish I'd started investing 10 years earlier! The LISA is an easy way to get free money that I would be investing anyway, & as investing is for the long term then I'm happy to leave it alone until I'm 60.

My rule is - hold cash for the short term, s/s ISA to try & beat inflation over the medium/long term, LISA for some tax efficient, tax free income in retirement.

colinbest2

So last night I went through, logged down all my bills and usual expenses and used the site youneedabudget.com to set out a budget for the rest of the month. Really cool website.

As part of this you have to assign you savings for specific jobs, home improvements, holidays, emergency fund etc. I assigned an amount of 3x my wage as my emergency fund and after assigning the rest of my savings into potential jobs I have some money that I just can't budget for, it's just surplus there to attain interest. I'm getting the impression that this surplus of money in my savings is better suited to be going to a LISA or S&S ISA as opposed to just sitting in my Marcus account?

Again, thanks all for the replies. All have been really helpful!