I’ll be honest, no one more surprised than me that I’m actually writing this post. After all, opening a stocks and shares ISA has been on my yearly goals for the past two years (2014 goals and 2015 goals) and it’s in the eleventh month of the second year that I finally get round to actually doing it. Nothing like avoiding the issue!
The thought of investing does scare me slightly still, but I realised that if I was going to be serious about retiring early and providing an income or having enough money stashed away for that period of time, I would need to invest in order to meet our target. The numbers are a stretch goal at the best of times, but who knows what the future holds. Investing will hopefully mean that we will definitely meet our long term goals.
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So, I decided in the end to open a stocks and shares ISA that could hold both funds and individual shares. I have also decided that the path I’m going to take is 50% funds and 50% shares. That way, I think I cover most bases, plus it isn’t as risky as it could be. I am also looking at dividend growth investing, and have opted to have all dividends kept as cash within my ISA, so I can re-invest them where I see fit. So the snowball will begin to roll, slowly at first but everyone has to start somewhere! How about you see how much your ISA is worth and how much you could save?
So, in my ISA (so far) I have the following:
Funds:
- Vanguard LifeStrategy 60% Equity Income – 5.3 shares (£699.99 value)
Shares:
- Marks and Spencer (MKS) – 16 shares (£80.16 current value)
- Morrison (Wm) Supermarkets (MRW) – 52 shares (£80.86 current value)
- Vodaphone Group (VOD) – 17 shares (£38.25 current value)
As you can see, the weighing at the moment is far in the favour of the fund, but this is just the beginning steps into my investing adventure. My current total at the moment is £899.26 so not the biggest amount. But I am doing more and more reading – when the baby lets me – and looking at different companies to invest in. As I’m looking at dividends as the main contributor, rather than growth, it’s taking me a bit longer to sift through lots of information that can be quite confusing at times. They don’t make financial talk straightforward do they?!
I’m also looking forward to receiving dividends, as I have read many blogs which discuss this often. I’ll finally be able to do the same! Now, the amount I receive to begin with will be pennies, rather than the hundreds that I often read about, but the only way is up. Once I figure out how you do it, I’ll add a portfolio page to my blog that updates the prices in current times, through a google doc. Just need to find out how you do it so it automatically updates with the latest prices – does anyone know how to do it?
So, I’ve started to invest, finally! Woohoo! 🙂
What are your favourite investing blogs? Please leave them in the comments – I need more blogs to read!
Hi there. Most of the FI blogs out there focus almost exclusively on investing in the stockmarket (indexfunds, stocks, binds etc). One of my favourite blogs is affordanything.com. Paula has a different approach. She invests in real estate and does all sorts of other stuff as well.
Starting your own (online) business, or having a close look at real estate can be a much quicker (and often) less riskier path than the stockmarket.
We are FI today with real estate and own (mostly passive) business. Stocks / ETFs are the next step. Good luck!
I would like to own a buy-to-let one day but that’s much further down the line 🙂
congrats Nicola – so pleased to hear you finally took the plunge 🙂
Thanks, Cathy!
Cool. What an exciting time. I remember when I first bought some stocks. Since then I’ve moved almost exclusively to index funds. I still have some of those stocks, and I rarely buy new ones. I feel much better looking at the current value of our mutual funds, where checking on individual stock prices just caused me agita.
Whenever I need investing advice I turn to the Bogleheads wikipedia. It’s written by people who have thought a lot about investing, and it offer lots of impartial advice on different topics. JL Collins has a great series on his blog about stock investing too.
I’ll have a look at Bogleheads – thanks for the tip 🙂
Congratulations, I’m pleased you finally did it. On your spreadsheet you can use the ‘googlefinance’ function to automatically get stock prices, just do a search for that and you’ll find how to set it up as well as further data or van automatically pull
Thanks – I shall look into that to see if I can set it all up 🙂
Nicola, I think the blog by Tawcan could help you. He posts a lot on investment. Here’s the link http://www.tawcan.com/.