How did you learn about money?

[Tableclothing]

Like, how to manage it, how to think long term, how to balance risks, how to prepare for the future.

A while back DH inherited about £600k from his parents. Some of it got spent on a house. About £400k is in investments of one sorry or another. DH also inherited the financial advisor, and basically we've depended on the advisor to tell us what to do.

Our combined income (from working) is about 50k. We're in the North East and this combined with no mortgage means we've been pretty comfortable and haven't had to touch any of the rest of the inheritance.

Now we're expecting our first child and it's got us thinking about the money, and whether we're doing the right thing by basically letting it sit there, mostly in low - risk places.

Questions we're trying to answer include: should we just hang on to it? Should we spend a chunk on improving our much loved but small and aging home? How should we provide for our child's future? What about our own retirements?

We had a long talk this morning and realised that the reason we've never really done anything with it is because we're scared of wasting it and have no clue what we're doing. The financial advisor basically asks what level of risk we're happy with and then goes and does stuff. Tbh I'm not even sure what a lot of the terminology means.

If you are still reading (thank you!) and you would know what you wanted to do in our situation, how did you learn??? Books? OU courses? This wasn't covered in PHSE when I was at school...

I started by reading early retirement threads, which got me on to reading books ("A Random Walk Down Wall Street" is excellent), which then got me into reading the Financial Times.

That's how I learned about money and financial management

I'm not sure if this answers the question you asked, but I have heard a couple of the episodes in the Radio 4 series The Money Clinic and they have been quite interesting. They interview two people and talk about the why of money rather than the how or what. It's quite illuminating to hear people discussing their fears, preconceptions, misunderstandings etc.
I think that a discussion between the two of you about what your common goals are would be best before heading off to see an IFA. Money is a metaphor, a means to an end - you need to decide what your 'end' is first. Try listening to "Julie and Paul". Even though they are nearing retirement you may find their discussion along the lines of being "scared of wasting it" and 'what is it for' relevant.

I learnt to manage money by racking up loads of debts and the paying them off and learning to live within my means. Not helpful for your queries re investments and managing a windfall.

For what it's worth though, I would do up the house to maintain the condition and value, and add to your enjoyment of the place.

Moneysavingexpert is incredibly useful. There are articles about just about everything you can think of to do with money except, ironically for you, investing.

A good 'sense check' is their money makeover. Maybe once a year or so, just skim through it and do what's relevant - check/change gas and electricity etc.

Also sign up to their weekly email, to pick up ongoing tips and do what you think's beneficial. As you're quite comfortable, you may not think it's worth scratching around for the odd freebie here and there, but it's a useful reminder about utility costs, thinking about what you're paying for broadband etc, because you can save hundreds of pounds a year on basic bills, just by shopping around.

What I'd be most concerned about with an IFA is whether you're getting value from whatever you're paying them, ie is your money making enough extra over sorting it out yourself to cover their fees.

As standard rate tax payers you both have an allowance of £1k pa for interest, and a low risk way to account for a lot of the money is to put it in instant access cash, which will pay around 1.5%, some fixed term products that will pay around 2-2.5%, premium bonds might be useful, and you could probably look at index tracker funds, which is a bit more risky but considered fairly low risk and a reasonable chance of performing better than cash, over the long term.

So you need them to beat all that by enough to cover what you pay them (and the charges in the products - tracker funds might have an annual management charge that is over and above what the IFA charges) and hopefully more - do you know what you do pay them?

Pensions - you want to be in your employer's pensions because they will contribute and you get tax relief so it's worth much more than what it costs you in terms of how much your wages reduce by.

Also it's a good time to look at the impact of having DC - reduced income due to parental leave, any childcare costs, are either of you looking to SAH/go part time?

And life insurance/income protection once you have a child to think about as well as a partner, although you might think you have sufficient resources already, as if the worst happened, you have the mortgage free house and significant savings, which should allow the surviving partner to carry on without working for a good few years so not needing to cover childcare etc. Or maybe only basic life insurance and not bother with illness cover etc, which is expensive - so probably better to self insure.

NE with that sort of money - I'd start a property empire - rent it out now, put the income into trust for the child/ren and your child/ren will never have a mortgage either.