Accidental Investors?

This blog post was originally written in March 2014 for our sister website – The Money Muppet. We set that site up in January 2014 as we embarked on our journey to financial freedom. The Money Muppet site no loner exists, so we’ve incorporated our financial journey into our travel blog.

So, I’ve finally gotten started on my financial education.

I’ve ploughed through books and websites, and spoken with a few friends and colleagues, to start getting to grips with the Great Taskmaster that is money. Ju, of course, got to grips with much of this years ago. She has Scottish blood. Perhaps for this reason, whenever I mention to her some nugget of magical insight I’ve just found, she nods her head knowingly. Hmmmm.

The best resource I found so far for those with muppet-level financial knowledge, like me, has been Meaningful Money. Pete Matthew runs the site, and mixes up podcasts, descriptive text and videos. I like the videos best, especially as he’s usually stood somewhere idyllic describing safe withdrawal rates or financial salary pensions – makes it all a bit more bearable. His videos are all on YouTube; I can highly recommend them. Here’s the introduction one:

Having watched a few of these videos, it occurred to me that we’re already investors. Whoa! I’d scared myself silly about investing – sounds risky… I’ve been steeling myself towards getting started in this shady, evil world. Turns out we both started years ago. We’re already investors, if not very knowledgeable or good ones! We both have pensions. Ju has some bonds. We’ve got shares which our previous company offered to us and we took without much thought. We’ve some cash. We have two rental properties, although we bought neither as a buy to let. We already have a portfolio, of sorts.

Basically, we’re already wallowing around in the wicked world of wonga, without even wealising it.

So, what have we been up to on our dastardly plan for freedom this week or so? We’ve been busy:

• I’ve picked up a copy of the The Financial Times Guide to Investing from the library. It’s fairly heavyweight and to be honest Pete’s videos are closer to my level of understanding at the moment. I suspect it’ll go back half read and I’ll get it again when I’ve reduced my level of muppetness.
• We’ve got some good news on the mortgage front. As I’m an IT contractor, a colleague at work has pointed me in the direction of Freelancer Financials, who specialise in people in my situation. I earn a good income (touch wood), but my limited company only pays me a minimum wage for tax reasons, and I’ve less than 3 years accounts. Mortgages from the high street aren’t available, but this company can source them. We are of course carefully comparing what they offer versus the high street offers, and they’re not too far off the mark.
• Given the fact mortgages are available to us, we’ve started the hunt for a buy-to-let. The two properties we’ve seen so far, which both needed work, sold either before we got there or a few days after. The market’s hot, which is a pain. We’ll find somewhere soon and I’ll be rolling my sleeves up and hunting about for my tile cutter.
• We’ve mapped out our portfolio of investments (pensions, property, cash, premium bonds, individual shares and in future we’ll add ISA-wrapped funds into the mix). On a little grid we listed them down the side, then worked out a risk level for each pot and sussed where we needed to move next. Some of this was done over a couple of beers in the pub last night, so Ju had to remind me what we’d agreed this morning. A financial advisor may well be needed soon, a sober one, but for the time being we’re going it alone.

Right, time to watch some more of Pete!

Cheers, Jason

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