Is my money in the right places?

Lostprophet

Hello!
New member here, after hearing Martin on Radio 1 and 2 and browsing this site every so often, I thought I'd hop on the forums and see if I could get some advice. Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but it contains a little from Column A and a little from Column B if you know what I mean

I'm 23 years old, currently living at home, and an IT Contractor. As such I'm getting paid handsomely with no real outgoings - yet. I'm soon going to be getting a place much closer to work (I currently have a 190 mile per day commute:eek: )

Since I started working, I've pretty much bumbled along in terms of money. At first I was getting paid a pittance, and I spent everything I earned. Then I started earning more, but at the start of this year I used most of it to pay off a Career Development Loan. As such, I'm almost starting from scratch now.

My money gets paid into a Barclays account - nothing special, just a bog standard current account that I've had from the age of 14 or something.
Almost all my standing orders (subscriptions, any bills, etc.,) come out of this account.

I have an Egg Savings Account, which I will be moving any money 'left over' at the end of each month into from Barclays.
With that, I have an Egg Credit Card, which is used for personal purchases. I did have some standing orders coming out of that (magazine subscriptions for example) but have since changed that on two items.

Am I right in thinking I should NOT be putting things like that on the credit card?

I have an Egg Money account. Each time I get paid, I calculate what I invoiced as tax relief (expenses incurred as part of the job), then move that amount from what I got paid into the Egg Money account.
This comes with the Egg Money Credit Card, which I use for all work-related purchases (food and petrol mainly). I also use it to withdraw cash for food and toll usage (£5.30 a day to get back into Wales!)

I opened Egg Money purely as a way to seperate out 'My Money' vs 'Expenses', however as the Money account gives reasonable interest on a positive balance, that should help a little, as I should always have a positive balance on that account.

I've also just opened an IceSave ISA, which I plan to use to start a pension fund. With all the uncertainties in the world at the moment, I'm a little bit nervous of putting the money with a 'pension scheme' just yet.
Is this a wise decision, or am I losing out by using an ISA instead of a pension scheme?


I guess the ultimate question is ... does that look like a sensible setup?
I know it's a lot of information and perhaps a bit cheeky dumping it all here and hoping someone will analyse it, but I thought better to put it all in one place than strew it over several threads