Situation X: Advice on savings / assets

BellaRaj

Hey all,

Would love some advice / new perspectives on what you would do in this situation:

Me and my partner are not married. We have two pre-teen kids at school. We live in the South West in a 2.5 bed semi detached rented house (£1250). I own a property outright in London worth £375-400K. I owe about 10% of this if sold to an investor. It is rented out for £2k pcm before expenses, which basically covers our rent and house bills. I have about 25K in savings. My partner has about 40K in savings. He is older and would be unlikely to get a mortgage. He has adhoc non permanent work. We both have a profession that we have not been able to get off the ground since moving down here, so I basically don't work at the moment (have been applying unsuccesfully to jobs) and therefore can't get a mortgage easily.

Aside from getting a job, what would you do to make sure our investments grow as opposed to getting eroded by inflation, silly spending and paying off someone elses mortgage by renting. We would ideally like our own home down here, but the area we live in, we really won't get anything very nice for the money we will get from selling my property and if we want to move abroad in the future it definately won't have the same rental value. Have no idea what we could invest in as a business and have 0 understanding of stocks, shares no matter how hard i try!! Should we invest in a finacial planner? Just trying to get ideas really. Thanks in advance.

anxiousnow

You've not mentioned your ages, but if you are under 40, you can get a stocks and shares LISA which you can add £4K a year to and receive a 25% bonus from the government. You can contribute up to age 50 but can't access it until age 60 unless buying your first property. For me it's a good way of investing in S&S whilst benefitting from that government buffer.

Are you happy continuing to rent where you are? From what you have said it sounds like you wouldn't consider selling your London property for various reasons you've covered, however, rental costs always come as a shock! 

BellaRaj

Nope - unfortunately just turned 40 and had never heard of these. Would consider selling London, but just needs to be worth it.

subjecttocontract

Holiday lets can be quite profitable if you live close by and don't need to employ to many others. Depends on your area.

eskbanker

BellaRaj said:

Aside from getting a job, what would you do to make sure our investments grow as opposed to getting eroded by inflation, silly spending and paying off someone elses mortgage by renting.

Stopping 'silly' spending should be an obvious place to start, although is presumably a fairly peripheral part of the picture?

There's normally little enthusiasm on here for BTL properties, relative to other forms of investment, but if you already have one and it's providing enough income to keep you afloat then it may be best to hang onto it, in the absence of employment, although there may presumably be a CGT bill at some point in the future, unless that's what you mean by losing 10% of its sale value?

If you have £65K of savings between the two of you, then it makes sense to optimise that by maximising interest rates and/or using ISAs to shelter them from tax, but personally I'd steer clear of investing it at this point, if you don't have a job and your partner's employment is 'ad hoc'.

Eyeful

This should help in your understanding of investment at least.
Watch this:  https://www.kroijer.com/
https://monevator.com/passive-fund-of-funds-the-rivals/
https://monevator.com/best-global-tracker-funds/

Brie

Can't really help on the investment front so I'm just going to ask the obvious given that you are not married....do you both have wills?  And because you have kids....do you have life insurance?  Hopefully it's a yes to both.

LHW99

And the obvious - what pension provision do you both have?