A ‘smart financial moves’ thread

[crabsaremisunderstood]

A space to share anything and everything, big or small, that has helped your finances in some way recently. You never know - it might help another person on this thread!

My smart move was opening a Lifetime ISA 3 years ago. The government gives you 25% on top of everything you put in, on funds up to £4k a year. If you put in £1k, you get £250 extra! I bought my first house this year and wouldn’t have become a homeowner if it hadn’t been for this. For those that have already bought a first home, you can also use it to give yourself a retirement fund.

Great thread OP.

Not overpaying my mortgage when I can beat the interest rate with savings. So right now my mortgage is 2.01%, but by splitting my overpayment across various savings accounts I can average c.4% interest. So I will keep my "overpaymehts" until I have to remortgage at a rate which is worse than the savings rate, at which point I'll pay the overpayment in so it doesn't count towards the permitted 10% overpayment.

I had some pension money invested in FTSE all share. At one point in September I had £57k. I noticed the market was plummeting down to £48k on October 8th so rang up my pension provider and moved investments into commodities Shell, Chevron, BHP, Rio Tinto, Hess, Total Utilities, ExxonMobil's and Freeport McMoran. Yesterday they were back up to £57k in less than a month. If I had not been on top of game and got them moved they would have dropped even lower than £48k.

Tracker mortgage for our house as ftbs. Everyone around us was getting fixed rates and couldn't understand our thinking. From day 1 we overpaid the mortgage (it was lower than the rent we used to pay so we topped up the standing order to match it) and whenever we got a pay rise or something we'd increase it. We paid off the mortgage in 9 years. Our friends all still have many years to go and most of them earn more than we do.

I don't think I've made a single good financial choice tbh, I'm terrible at saving and overspend all the time. I am lucky however to own my house, so I supposed being in the right place at the right time to be able to buy is my one good thing!

Asking for stuff at work more I. E. Boss said we each get a £500 allowance for job relevant training. I mentioned that the training I wanted to do was more, so coukd I just deduct £500: he offered to pay it all!

So I get a new qualification, for free!

10 years ago I'd have been too timid and just paid it all myself

Fab - well done. I don’t even have a pension yet (SE) but this is my next financial move. The house had to come first!

Another one of mine is using Plum which is a virtual piggy bank app. It takes small amounts out of your account based on how much is going in at one particular time (small enough you’re unlikely to notice much). Log in a few months later and you’ve got several hundred pounds in there! I often put that towards a trip away or if I’m being boring, my tax bill.

Yes, you can absolutely use a LISA for retirement @PinkArt although I agree it isn’t that widely advertised. You can only pay into it until you are 50 so depends on your age.

www.moneyboxapp.com/faqs/lisa/how-can-i-use-my-lifetime-isa-for-retirement/

Now THIS is cunning.

Some really good ideas here, please keep them coming!

Putting the DCs Child Benefit into allshare tracker funds/CTF from 0-18. Then getting them to open LISAs at 18. Now they have tens of thousands to use for a decent house deposit.
Putting half of every raise onto the mortgage repayment each month, meant we paid it off in our 30s and have plenty of headroom to see the DCs through university.
Buying in the North instead of London (DH's first graduate job was either North or South office, and we could afford a house in the North) meant we could use our student loans for a house deposit straight out of Uni.
Budget spreadsheet (just Excel) helped us keep tabs on household spending and budgets so we have never had debt except the mortgage.

Good moves I've made:

Opening a pension at 21 in my first job.
Being married and owning a home before kids.
Opening a LISA for pension purposes. I've had 6k from the government so far
Finding moneysavingexpert in my 20s.
Finding YNAB in my 30's
Finding the Batch Lady in my 40's.

Bad financial moves I've made:
Getting into debt for socialising at Uni and in my early 20's
Smoking. I dread to think how much extra I'd have saved if I had given up at 21 not 31.

Buying gold with some of saving to protect it against inflation.

A lot of it is down to luck and timing. Our last house we paid 10% overpayments on the mortgage which gave us greater equity when we moved house earlier this year. We were incredibly lucky to get a mortgage of 0.99% fix for 5 years.

I like to claim as much from the banks as possible, switching bonuses/ cashback/ rewards etc my credit cards (all my spending goes on) earn me approx £15pm cashback. I average £5pm on the receipt apps, I earn £10pm net for cashback on my monthly DDs and always move my savings to the best rate available.

I'm currently stoozing with a 0% credit card, the money is in an interest bearing account.

I price check most of my purchases for the best deal. Use discount codes, student card, quidco etc.

Switching my monthly phone contract from Vodafone to a sim only contract with O2. I've saved about £20 a month since on the bill alone. Plus, it allowed me to join Airtime rewards which I make money back on stuff I buy anyway and then redeem it off my phone bill. So every other month I don't pay anything for my phone bill!

Also, I refixed my mortgage in summer this year just before it went crazy high. Very relieved I didn't wait another 6 months.

Sorted out my dire interest savings account.

I had savings in a Lloyds savings account paying 0.4%.

I then found if you open up a club Lloyds current account (£3 a month fee but this is waived if you pay in £1,500 per month) you can get the club Lloyds savings account which pays 5.25% interest and, crucially, is instant access.

Also by having a club Lloyds account I get 6 free cinema tickets a year. Wooo.

On phones, my phone provider wanted to raise my sim only contract by 11% so I looked online, then messaged them and told them I'd like their online deal instead of staying on my one.
They transferred me in minutes, so now I pay 10% less than the previous deal (before the rise) and have 10 times as much data.

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Pots for various things within my banking app, with automatic transfers set up for the day after I get paid. Adjusting for any payrises so I never get ‘extra’ money if I am saving for something specific.

Never shopping when hungry.

@crabsaremisunderstood your OP didn't say whether you chose the cash LISA or the Stocks & Shares LISA. If you'd invested in S&S option a few years ago, your pot would have grown nicely over the savings period, but anyone making the same decision now might expect choppy waters ahead. In the meantime, the MoneyBox cash interest rate of 2.75% (3% for the first year) looks ok-ish but rates are rising across the board, so hopefully it will rise along with them.

To answer your question, I think our good financial move was to invest in our own home as much as we could afford - an extension and a loft conversion, then upgrading to a bigger house when we could, rather than buying a rental property. It's much more tax efficient (and pleasurable) to live in the property you invest in than to rent it out. When the time is right, we will downsize and split the surplus between our sons for a deposit on their own homes.

Indoctro - do you mean physical gold?

Sittingonacornflake - that’s a really good tip. Thank you. I’ll be talking it over with DH.

Two posters above have mentioned not having credit cards, I would advise the opposite.
If you purchase something or pay for a deposit for something using a credit card then you have far more protection if the product is faulty or the company goes bust.

Example, you pay for a fridge freezer and before it can be delivered the company goes bust. Under Section 75 rules your credit card company will reimburse you. If you’ve paid using another method you do not have that protection.

I wouldn’t buy anything over £100 without using a credit card, especially in these uncertain times. Add to that some CC are still offering rewards in the way of points or shop vouchers.

We opened a SIPP for DD when she was a few months old and put a one-off £3k in. It's expected be roughly 50k when she retires

Good moves:
Encouraging good money sense to kids. DS has several accounts. High days/holidays and long term savings plus his everyday account. He's getting a LISA in few months. He forgets about the S.O every month and already has £5k between the two savings accounts in just 15 months.

Encourage kids to save plus have fun.

Also put aside some child benefit if possible. Bought DS first car with it.

A few years ago changed mortgage product for a cheaper rate then used the difference to overpay the mortgage.

Bad moves:
Listening to "pub talk" about great investments and the next best sure fire thing....

Helpful thread thank you

I started a pension in my 20s but it was pretty rubbish. I moved into the public sector to get a much better pension & also do AVCs. I put money into s&s isas but to be honest they have performed really badly the last year but hoping in 20 years time it corrects.

The best thing for me financially was paying off debt & building up a good pot of savings. It really is a snowball effect & now I have the savings I find it much easier to save.