Best decision and worst decision.

Retireby40

Hello everyone,

This is just a thread that may help the newer or younger investors/savers starting out as there's a lot of experienced investors on the forum that we could learn from.

What was your best decision in terms of savings/finance/investing?

What was your biggest mistake? 

mark_cycling00

Not a decision. But discover what type of personality you are before you start 

Are you likely to panic and sell at the bottom?

Will you obsess over a few Investments and lose sight of the bigger picture?

Will you egotistically think you're a genius if your investments go up and never sell out when you should?

InvesterJones

Best: Continuing to invest when all was doom and gloom

Worst: Not starting sooner

Brie

Discovering regular savings accounts.  Previously I had put a similar amount into my piggy bank.  (yes, a huge ceramic one that sits near the front door).  It was a great way to see what could be done with a relatively small amount of money over the course of a year and managed to get a bit of interest.  (my Piggy was never generous....)

On a similar vein.....when I started working for a large company the department admin spent a induction day with me explaining all the things about the company, payroll, holiday booking etc etc.  One thing that was mentioned was the share save and share purchase schemes.  She pointed out that by putting a small amount of money into a share save scheme I could save a nice chunk that would be paid back to me in X years time with the potential of making a tidy profit if the share price went in my favour.  She also pointed out that the best thing to do was to not max my participation in any year but to plan to put £25 in the first year, £25 the next etc so that in a few years I would have a share option maturing every single year.  It worked out very nicely.  An absolutely painless way to save as I never had to think about it or ration what was actually in my bank account as it never made it that far.  It's been great to get a "bonus" every year a month before Christmas for the last 10 years. 

Likewise - share purchase.  Now i understood this idea already having previously been in a monthly share scheme privately.  What surprised me completely though was how little others understood how this worked.  A couple of colleagues who had been in the scheme for years were lamenting the drop in share prices in 2008/9.  How the share they had purchased at £7 were now worth 70p.  Well yes but they never really paid £7 for shares.   They bought shares at the daily price which might have been £7 for a brief time but for every share they bought they were given another for free.  So effectively £3.50 a share.  And they didn't stop to think about the average share price they had paid over the 15 years or so they had been in the scheme.  Made me a bit concerned as they were working in a financial institution and it was obvious they couldn't think their way around simple (to me) mathematics.

Albermarle

Best - Adding the full £40K into my pension ( including 40% tax relief as I just about earned enough to do this )) for the last few years I was working, by using savings as well as the regular contributions.

Worst - Having too much in cash savings for too long.

Chloe_G

Closing my Cheltenham and Gloucester Account and missing out on one of the first carpet bagging payments.  I've never got over it.

Bobziz

mark_cycling00 said:

Not a decision. But discover what type of personality you are before you start 

Are you likely to panic and sell at the bottom?

Will you obsess over a few Investments and lose sight of the bigger picture?

Will you egotistically think you're a genius if your investments go up and never sell out when you should?

Agree 100% with this, but how best to understand how you'll react when you're not actually invested ? 

libra10

The worst decision we made was keeping our Halifax demutulisation shares in a PEP for so long.  We had a considerable number of shares, and although I wanted to sell my husband thought it would be like selling the family silver!  When the bank collapsed, we ended up with almost nothing.
The best decisions have been following MSE advice, and opting for the most competitive interest rates on savings.  After we lost so much money on shares, we decided to play it safe.

uk1

My best decisions -  I’d pick a few.

Firstly, I decided when I was employed by a large American corporation to put 16% of my earnings into pensions.  I also took a smaller less ostentatious  company car and used the monthly car contribution saving and put it into pensions. 

Then when I sought advice on whether I should transfer from my DB pension scheme on leaving the company  I was offered a free company paid for consultation with a fully qualified and registered IFA in return for a complete finance checkover.  Instead I insisted on paying a fee.  Eventually I realised I’d made a mistake but felt that I knew what I ws doing and it was my own fault.  So the next good decision was that I had been told by another IFA that under the then current appeal rules I would probably win a misselling  appeal so believing I hadn’t been misled  I proceeded with a review. I was actually  honest and said I didn’t feel I was missold.    To my surprise I won the appeal but the calculation was that I hadn’t lost anything because the value was what it would have been if I had remained. 

So I asked to see the calculations which at first I was refused but then eventually they were sent to me.  On checking their figures I realised that they had totally disregarded and missed my large AVC pot which when added represented a potential uplift of several hundred thousand.  I was reinstated into the company with an enormous contribution added into the  scheme and I felt for reasons I never fully understood that I was actually better off than if I had remained in it all along.  So several good compound decisions that has turned out to be life-changing financially.

The scheme I left was Equitable Life. 

The business related decision I most look back  on affectionately was never saying “no” to  project requested by a valuable client that I didn’t fancy doing but instead always saying I’d be delighted but quoting a silly fee.  To my surprise most of these non-flyers flew and we earned a lot from doing the odd thing we might not have been initially keen on and it bought us some property. 

The next was to make many years of voluntary NI contributions for my wife’s state pension (old scheme) so it gave her the full state benefit.  I then deferred taking both our pensions for several years which under the old scheme gave a very good uplift.  I  also bought several pensions when we started our own business.  The net effect of all these decisions was that we were able to live decently having retired at around 50 or so.

My worst decision was not leaving the Corporation earlier and starting a decent business that everyone said was an idea that was a non-starter and would never work and that I’d fail and regret leaving.  I always followed my own instinct and I have always believed that a decent instinct was another word for decent luck.

I think on balance, we’ve made our own luck but still feel fortunate.

JGB1955

Our worst one was investing in  NatWest staff shares..... all gone!

MisterMotivated

My best decision was without doubt deciding to start keeping track of everything I spent, and actively managing my finances.  Helped to see where my money was disappearing to and made me realise just how much of it I was wasting.

My second worst decision was buying more Carillion shares when it became obvious they were in trouble, thinking that the government would do something to help them out considering their size and all the government contracts they had

ETA: My actual worst decision was deciding against throwing a couple of hundred quid into an interesting new thing called Bitcoin, since I had just bought a house and should be focusing on rebuilding my savings instead of wasting it on something that seemed like a bit of a gimmick.  At one point it would've been worth tens of millions, though I would've probably cashed out around 6 figures at best anyway