You have 300k to invest, wwyd?

[Theyarehappygolucky]

How would you invest £300k? What do you think your return would be on a 10 year period?

Yep.

Educate yourself as much as possible.
There are plenty of funds to invest in but you need to understand the risk and rewards and the most important aspect is how much the Fund manager will take in fees!!

St. James’s place I believe take a chunky fee unlike Vanguard funds are lower fees. Reading Warren Buffet would be a good start.
The best of luck and I hope you get to spend some!

St James Place are not independent

Thank you everyone, there are some real gems in here.

I'm convinced a financial advisor would be a great idea.

I wonder if there's a good way to pick one cost Vs performance for the amount I'm wanting to invest. I can only imagine the fees for such a person would vary wildly.

Firstly don't rush anything, it's perfectly possible for you to invest the money yourself once you have a good idea of how much risk you are prepared to take.
10 years is still a fairly short term investment time frame.
If I was in your position I would look at something along the lines of Vanguard life strategy 60 maybe even the 40. HSBC do a similar product with different levels of risk.
Return wise historically you would be looking at 4-5% above inflation per year with Volatility of 9-10% with a worst year decline of 30%.
The only a real value a IFA has is to encourage good behaviour, to stop their client panic selling when markets are down which could be worth the money for some people.
Tim Hale has written a very good book for U.K investors - Smarter Investing, with lots of examples of how you can expect different investments to perform and how to combine them according to risk tolerance and time horizon.

This is literally the riskiest thing to do?! Guaranteed baked-in losses due to inflation

Agree, this is what I'm doing due to indecision and it feels wrong

Then speak to a professional. It's been 2 weeks since you started this thread & you're no further forward. £300k is too much to be left to advice off a forum or a youtube video.

Imagine you had a hole in the roof of your house. Would you spend weeks talking to hairdressers or taxi drivers ? No, you call up a roofer & get them to fix it. Same if you had a leak in your bathroom. You wouldn't leave it for weeks on end you'd call a plumber.

Interesting enough, I am almost exactly in this position, today I handed a cheque for $350,000 to my investment advisor. In general, I am comfortably off.

I am almost 80, and have a five year horizon, and of course I cannot weather any market downturns. We agreed to put 20% into the market (stocks), 40% into 1 year GICs, and 40% into medium-term bonds. Interest rates are likely to fall over the next year, hence the move into bonds.

$350,000 is a lot of money to me, I mentioned this to my advisor. He agreed, but said that he "moves" a few million a DAY for his clients. Just numbers to him.

Especially if you are new at investing, talk to an independent investment advisor.

Hire an financial advisor and invest. My investments are spread against large, med and small caps stocks, bonds and cash. I'm up over 10% on this year alone. There's really no money to be made in property unless you own multiple.

If you don't already have an emergency fund, I would invest the equivalent of 4 to 8 months' worth of regular expenses into liquid (readily available) savings. This can be any combination of saving accounts and short term gilts. Gilts are bonds issued by the UK government; they are exempt from capital gain taxes.
Of course maximise your tax free savings by using your ISA allowance first.

I would then look into your pension situation and consider whether it makes sense to increase your pension contributions, whether as a one off or on an ongoing basis.

Lastly, I would invest the rest into global stock market funds. An ETF tracking something like the MSCI World can be found for an ongoing cost of 0.12% to 0.20% per annum. You can easily buy those into a brokerage account like Interactive Investor or Aj Bell. Do look into how ETFs are taxed outside of ISAs and pensions https://www.justetf.com/uk/news/passive-investing/how-etfs-are-taxed-in-the-uk.html

If all of this sounds alien to you, do consider paying for an independent financial advisor. But stay well away from needlessly expensive services like St James Place. Paying for independent advice can make sense; overpaying for the same service you can get at a fraction of the cost doesn't.

Also, many forums love premium bonds. I don't. Capital is guaranteed but the return is not. There are many situations where saving accounts or gilts make more sense.

You may also want to look at the UK Personal Finance flowchart https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/ox0rm8/modpost_ukpf_flowchart_update/ on reddit

Talk to a registered, independent financial adviser.

St James Place are NOT independent.
They overcharge big time.
You want to be advised by someone who gets paid for their time, not for the products they convince you to buy.

An independent financial advisor is like a surveyor: they'll tell you if there is something wrong with a property, but they have no incentive recommending one property over another, they get paid the same.

St James Place are like a real estate agent: if you don't buy the property they're trying to sell you, they don't make money. So their "advice" is hardly independent.