Increasing your Net Worth

longleggedhair

Buying a house I couldn’t really afford in 2000. It was a huge financial struggle at the time but has tripled in value since, those lean times taught me to be frugal & after the collapse in interest rates in 2008 I was lucky enough to have a tracker mortgage. I’ve been investing with the interest savings since which has proven extremely profitable. One piece of advice is ALWAYS buy your home, it’s transformed my financial situation & my wealth directly & indirectly.

Annie1612

longleggedhair said:

Buying a house I couldn’t really afford in 2000. It was a huge financial struggle at the time but has tripled in value since, those lean times taught me to be frugal & after the collapse in interest rates in 2008 I was lucky enough to have a tracker mortgage. I’ve been investing with the interest savings since which has proven extremely profitable. One piece of advice is ALWAYS buy your home, it’s transformed my financial situation & my wealth directly & indirectly.

Similarly, we also moved around that time - December 1999. I uprooted the family (children just starting school at the time) from a 3 bed semi in a slightly depressed area and we borrowed the max we could afford which was 35k (plus a 4K gift from parents) to move 20 miles away to a 3 bed detached with large plot of land in a much nicer area with better schools. The area shot up in value when it came top in one of those “best places to live” lists some years ago. Old house now worth about £160-170k.  New house valued at over £500k. (To be fair, we have extended but did most of the work ourselves so only cost an extra 12k on the mortgage.)

MK62

To be fair, talexuser is likely referring to ISAs and their predecessors, PEPs (which were all turned into ISAs anyway).

justwhat

JGB1955 said:

I'm trying to REDUCE our net worth.  Need to get rid of £200K before the second of us dies - can't spend it fast enough.  After a life of frugality it's hard to spend and not look for YS items in the supermarket. Already  DOV £180K away... still working on the rest. First world problems!

That's one of the big snags with accumulating wealth. lol 

justwhat

Best  financial decision - Was purchasing and renovating property and also being an LL in the early years before all the red tap . Divorce from my first wife, she was a spender that thought there was a magic money tree lol 

Worse Decision - buying property abroad.  Not buying properties i had a gut feeling about 

As for tracking - no need as large chunks of profit at one time. While an LL money just accumulated in the bank and account was emptied at end of the year.

No more in investing (never say never lol) 

RG2015

Billycock said:

I was being fair, talexuser specifically said ISA's not me.

I wonder if talexuser was trying to keep it simple. I have an ISA that I first took out in 1991, thirty years ago.

I have not touched it in that time, so I consider that I have had the investment for thirty years.

However, to be precise, I invested in a PEP (personal equity plan) thirty years age and somewhere along the line it was converted into an ISA.

It was £1,000 in 1991 and is now worth about £7,200.

LHW99

Hearing from "Sid" - and carrying on investing thereafter!

talexuser

MK62 said:

To be fair, talexuser is likely referring to ISAs and their predecessors, PEPs (which were all turned into ISAs anyway).

Correct, thank you. And the waste of time "Single Company Pep" at 3k a year which I went into straight away. That was a crap shoot :-)

pip895

Signing up to my company DB scheme was probably my best move.  I bumped into an old colleague a few years back and mentioned I had just transferred my pension at over 500k - she looked a little sheepish and said - I opted out of that - OOPS! 

Whether the transfer out was a good move remains to be seen - Things have certainly started off well and my apparent net worth is much higher as a result, but I wont really know the answer for many years - possibly until after I'm dead! 

jimjames

pip895 said:

Whether the transfer out was a good move remains to be seen - Things have certainly started off well and my apparent net worth is much higher as a result, but I wont really know the answer for many years - possibly until after I'm dead! 

What transfer value did you get vs pension value? Was it above 20x?