Topic collection
Real stories about investing, gathered to help you recognise the trade-offs, avoid familiar mistakes, and make a wiser next choice.
Mum needs someone here most of the day. Money's always short. He sent screenshots, showed me his own balance on screen. I think I just wanted one thing to go right for once.
The screenshots looked real. I've looked at them again since. They still look real. I don't actually know what I missed.
I spent probably three or four years telling myself I'd save whatever was left over at the end of the month. There was never anything left over. Or there was twenty quid and I'd think, that's not worth moving, I'll do a bigger amount next month. I have a spreadsheet, two actually, where I mapped out savings targets at some point. I never hit them. I'm the kind of person who can spend forty minutes reading about the optimal savings strategy and then do nothing because I haven't decided on the optimal savings strategy yet. The spreadsheets are still there. I scroll past them sometimes.
I think my assumption was always that saving required me to be consistently good at making a decision, like every week or every purchase. And I'm not. Nobody really is, I think, or at least I'm definitely not. Removing the decision just meant my worst days didn't matter as much. Tuesday when I'm tired and I've had a bad standup and I want to buy something dumb, none of that touches the savings because the savings already happened. I'm not sure that counts as discipline exactly. It might just be laziness pointing in the right direction.
I started investing in first year because everyone in my flat kept talking about it and I felt stupid not doing anything. Put in a few hundred quid I'd saved from working summers, spread it across a few index funds, felt pretty good about myself. Then markets started dropping and I'd check my phone like six times a day watching the number go red. It wasn't even that much money objectively but it felt enormous. I remember sitting in a seminar I wasn't really listening to, just refreshing my portfolio app under the desk. Down nine percent. Down twelve. Down sixteen over like two weeks.
I think I understood investing as a concept before this happened. Like I knew you weren't supposed to sell low. But knowing that and then sitting there watching your money disappear in real time are completely different things and I was not ready for the second one. The crash didn't really cost me that much. Me panicking cost me. Which is an annoying thing to have to admit.
I was doing pre-season runs three times a week and eating pasta out of a saucepan and genuinely thought £50 was quite a lot of money. A guy from my old football club mentioned index funds in a car park after a match. I didn't fully understand it. I just set up the direct debit that weekend and then sort of forgot about it.
I don't think I was smarter than Dan. The money was small enough that I didn't notice it leaving. That might have been the whole thing, actually.
I talked about that company like it was a person. Told everyone. Bought shares every time I had spare money sitting around. The discount through payroll made it feel almost free, which, it wasn't.
I dunno. Maybe you shouldn't put your whole life on one number. Maybe I got unlucky. Both feel true.
I taught year three for a long time before I started thinking about any of this. Superannuation, funds, all of it felt like something other people understood. I had a managed fund set up and just left it. The fee was 1.8% and I remember thinking, when I did finally notice it on some paperwork under a fluorescent light in the staffroom, that a percent is nothing. Like a rounding error.
The word 'percent' does something to your brain. Makes it sound small. But compounded over twenty or thirty years that 1.8 was going to cost me something close to six figures. I hadn't known that. Nobody told me and I hadn't asked.
This was the eighties, early nineties maybe. I had a building society passbook somewhere, never used it. Just kept topping up the current account because that's where the money already was. Easier. The balance looked fine on paper.
Money sitting still isn't safe. I understand that now in a way I didn't then, or maybe didn't want to.
I always told myself I'd sort it later. When I was 25 I was renting, barely covering the month. When I was 30 I had a bit more coming in but there was always something. A car. Moving costs. I just kept moving the column out.
Pension contributions in your twenties are worth several times the same money contributed later. I knew this in theory. I teach it to junior staff now. I just never applied it to myself, which is a thing I have to sit with.