I love the analogy of saving and investing as rolling a snowball down a hill. Your portfolio starts off ping pong ball-sized – but you can end up with an avalanche of money. The Snowball was the perfect title for Warren Buffett’s biography. That said, sometimes in the midst of your journey to financial freedom you may doubt your snowball is growing. Especially when the markets are going nowhere. You’re automatically adding money to your accounts each month but your number isn’t growing. You might even feel like your snowball is melting. Keep at it! Those regular contributions to your equity f ..read more

The UK stock market has been on the ropes for ages. Clambering to its feet as the referee counts “six! seven!”… This article can be read by selected Monevator members. Please see our membership plans and consider joining! Already a member? Sign in here. The post Correcting market failure [Members] appeared first on Monevator ..read more

Apparently articles about the fag-end of my buy-to-let (BTL) portfolio are very popular. I don’t really understand why. Voyeurism, maybe? Well, if writing them puts even one potential landlord off from getting into BTL then I’m doing them a service. If you’re new, you might enjoy my first article in this series, about my formative days as a landlord in the 1990s. Or try the second about my one remaining property in London. The only other buy-to-let I have left – hopefully, the third is currently sold subject to contract – is a Victorian terrace in a pointless London commuter dormito ..read more

What caught my eye this week. Every morning at 9.30am in New York, a bell is rung at the famous Stock Exchange signaling the start of trading. It happens again with a closing bell at 4.30pm – repeating a routine that’s by watched by almost nobody in the actual business of investing. Okay, a few hundred floor traders are prompted to think about which route they’ll take home. A giddy CEO from a biotech wonders if they chose a diverse enough team to join them on the platform for the bell-ringing ‘ceremony’ they coughed up for. A retired dentist in Florida watching CNBC growls as yet another day ..read more

A new-ish short duration index-linked gilt fund from iShares gives UK investors an easy way to hedge against inflation – without taking on huge interest rate risk. Now I realise that sounded like “schmargle bargle bumpty tumpty” to some readers. So today I’ll explain as succinctly as I can why this new iShares fund should be good news for everyday UK investors like us. What’s that you say? ‘Should be’ good news? Ahem – yes. Alas there’s a catch. After a Monevator reader comment got us and others excited about this new fund, it transpires the reason we hadn’t heard of it seems to be becaus ..read more

What caught my eye this week. Hard to believe it’s more than ten years ago that I wrote – slightly tongue-in-cheek – about how I was betting against Neil Woodford. The then-lauded fund manager had just handed back the reins of the Edinburgh Investment Trust – one of several funds he ran as Invesco’s superstar manager – because he was opening his own fund shop. Edinburgh’s share price fell from a 5% premium to trade at a discount to NAV in response. But I reasoned: Sure, a few [other] income investment trusts are on a discount, but my point is it’s clearly possible to run an income trust and ..read more

I hadn’t heard of an ongoing investment club for many years before a long-time Monevator reader – and member of the Patrick Investment Club – dropped me a line. Such clubs were common 20-30 years ago. And as David Patrick’s guest article below shows, they filled a niche that today’s more impersonal and often abrasive social investing options hardly replace… For more than 25 years my extended family has been pooling monthly subscriptions of at least £50 into the Patrick Investment Club. This club has had a profound impact in helping us learn about investing. It has also helped bring us to ..read more

What caught my eye this week. Not one but two must-read articles for you this week. Less than ideal now the sun is finally showing its face, I know. The first comes from the ever-reliable Portfolio Charts. Inspired by the many criticisms that ‘safe’ withdrawal rate (SWR) research has overwhelmingly focused on US returns, Portfolio Charts conducted an incredibly deep dive into the SWRs of other countries – and also the myriad different asset allocation mixes you could have chosen to achieve them. It’s a valuable read. Not because I think anybody should load up on any particular asset allo ..read more

The time has come at last to make our first withdrawal from our No Cat Food (NCF) model retirement portfolio. This article can be read by selected Monevator members. Please see our membership plans and consider joining! Already a member? Sign in here. The post Decumulation strategy: first withdrawal, tax-free cash and drawdown antics [Members] appeared first on Monevator ..read more

Somewhat shockingly, it is now exactly 14 years since Monevator was lucky enough to post a three-part mini-series written by a man named Jacob – the up-and-coming voice behind an intriguing blog called Early Retirement Extreme. Then describing himself as semi-retired in his early 30s, Jacob was living an unusual lifestyle. One partly funded with investment income and partly from part-time work. In those faraway times when almost nobody had heard of the term FIRE, Jacob’s views were radical and exciting. My 2010 introduction read: “While I see echoes of his lifestyle in my own, Jacob goes much ..read more