Best Vanguard Index Tracker

bowlhead99

Speedster2 said:

Have a look at the options for investing through Plum. I’ve been using Plum for a year or so, just to harvest savings from my current account, then shifting the savings monthly into an offset mortgage product. This January started using the S&S ISA option Plum provides. Only starting small at around £100 in the first month into the Vanguard LifeStrategy 40. It would be fairly easy to scale that up to the amounts the OP wants to invest and split it across different funds. It’s not as diverse a plan as suggested by other posters above, but for a complete novice I think it could be a good starting point.

To invest with Plum, you pay £1 a month for Plum Plus and then 0.15% a year for the investment platform management and 0.22% a year running costs of the mixed asset investment fund you choose.

Call me a cynic but unless the OP is going to make use of all the other features of Plum by giving it read access to his bank account so it can read his transactions and try to sell him stuff, it would probably make more sense for the OP to save  just direct debit his preferred amount of money to Vanguard and pay them the 0.15% for the platform fee and 0.22% for the running costs of LifeStrategy, and then he doesn't need to pay Plum £1 a month.

I'm not denying that some of these new fintech startup services are attractive to some people, but Vanguard with literally trillions under administration and management will probably still be running their UK retail offering in years to come, while half (most?) of the lossmaking fintech startups will have gone through various disruptive reorganisations, takeovers or collapses, each of which could be a pain or an administrative hassle.

ozaz

I agree with with @bowlhead99

My suggestion to @timPgoodwin would be to spend a bit of time reading up on risk tolerance and deciding what his/her risk tolerance is. Then informed by that choose one of the five Vanguard Lifestrategy funds, direct from Vanguard. Doesn't get much more straightforward or lower-cost than that for a beginner investor who wants to keep things simple. 
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investing-explained/what-are-lifestrategy-funds