Hurrah, my MFW quest has started

abouttimetoo

Hi all

I got my electricity bill this morning, I know I'm not at home very much but I'm still really pleased with it. I've used £14.17 of electricity in the three month period but also got a £5.06 (duel fulel and direct debit disicount so the bill is really £9.11 - that's got to be great for three months! On top of that I'm still £37.81 in credit so time to reduce the monthly DD I think:j

abouttimetoo

My BTL tenant leaves next week - they ended up staying two weeks longer than planned but paid of course so every little helps.

My letting agent already has two viewings lined up for next week so fingers crossed one of them wants it. It's also being advertised at it's usual price - I had reduced it for the current tenant by £125 - so if it goes for that great, but if not I'm prepared to disount it again.

Got a couple of things to pay out for I think - some decorating now needed and new bedding i think but I'll be able to check next week when the tenant leaves

abouttimetoo

Hmm, I've got the chance to buy some Lloyds Banking Group shares as part of the open offer.... need to think about this over the weekend as it looks very tempting in terms of price but I will need to 'find ' approx £4500 - this will get me approx 12000 shares (not got the paperwork to hand). Part of me is thinking of old cliches like 'fortune favours the brave' and 'it's times like these that fourtunes can be made or lost'!

I'm verrrrrrrrrrrry tempted to buy and sit on them for a while, I'm dazzling myself with the profit that could be made if they even go up to a pound :rolleyes:

Any thoughts anyone??

Mortgage_Reduction_Novice

Nicely done on the elec bill.

Two viewings sounds good too... people interested certainly and a chance you can keep it at full asking rent that way.

Shares? Hmmm can't comment, not my field of interest! Mostly because I'm not a risk taker. Infact I fear financial risk.

StuartGMC

ATT
When looking at individual equities (or indeed Funds) consider how long you can keep them if they drop in value and whether you would for example happily lose 30-50% of your investment. What costs do you have related to purchase and then sale as this will influence the growth you need in order to turn a profit?

If you haven't maxed your Cash ISA allowance this year, will you be buying these shares within a Stocks & Shares ISA wrapper?

Pop the question up on the investments board for comment on the specifics, but also check the sites like trustnet, iii etc for news on the company and commentary from others.

Personally I don't have time to monitor individual equities so we pound cost average into funds each month (spread over high risk, medium risk and some smaller amount to a low risk fund). We were 50% or so down, presently we are only down 22% of our investments since June 2006, but we are continuing to invest each month (but not Russia & Greater Russia until it looks like minerals and oil & gas demands will rise).

Good luck

setmefree2

abouttimetoo wrote: »

Hi all

I got my electricity bill this morning, I know I'm not at home very much but I'm still really pleased with it. I've used £14.17 of electricity in the three month period but also got a £5.06 (duel fulel and direct debit disicount so the bill is really £9.11 - that's got to be great for three months! On top of that I'm still £37.81 in credit so time to reduce the monthly DD I think:j

well done on that :T:T

abouttimetoo

Hi all

All on track to pay the next bit of stooze money back next month. They've offered me some more but at 1.9% interest and 4% handling fee so no way am I touching that one with savings rates as they are.

The final tranche of my stooze money is not due to be repaid until September and I must admit that whilst it will get repaid it's going to be a bit shaky for me not least because I've dipped into it to buy the shares as mentioned in an earlier post. I didn't get time to post the question on the savinggs and investments board but to answer Stuarts question yes, I will be making ful use of the S&S ISA (i do every year).

All the shares I've bought up until these ones are for the longer term but I'm really keen to turn these ones round verrrry quickly, spent £3500 on the open offer ones as 38.43 pence and they have been hovering around the 70p mark for a week or so and even been up to £1.20 before the open offer so if I can double my money I think that would be more than acceptable. One good thing is that LBG forecasted that the shares would drop to the 70p mark following the open offer and that is indeed what they did so well anticipated.

Fingers crossed for me guys

Regards
ATT

abouttimetoo

PS I meant to add that looking at all the shares I have bought since October last year compared to their worth today they have now gone up 5% so the net position is looking good

StuartGMC

ATT
Good news on those investments; the trends since October in most markets have been excellent. In fact in some cases 57% growth in just the period since January was achieved in Russia and others are typically 25-35% up. For me unfortunately that means only the monies invested in that time, we're still clawing back previous losses but these are now 16% on the funds held and 18.9% in total since we commenced the investments monthly in 2006 (just when we moved mortgage).

You should definitely be able to turn a healthy profit on your recent stake which is excellent and I hope that earlier investment improves too, so the stoozing pays off; brave girl to gamble on that - well done you've got guts! :beer:

abouttimetoo

Well, I've sold some of the shares this week and made a profit of just short of £2500 so I'm very pleased about that. I really would have liked to have kept them for longer but I've had to turn some of them round for a few of reasons

• the open offer share certificates are due out in less that a fortnight so I was expecting the share price to drop as others take their profits
• I'd 'borrowed' from my stooze money to do the share purchases and this made me somewhat nervous so I wanted to take my profit and restore the stooze funds
• I've made a 74% profit and I don't think anyone can grumble at that and I didn't want to be too greedy:rolleyes:

I haven't sold all the shares and I'm pleased to say I can now afford to sit on them for a while longer