Investing for retirement

[madameimadam]

Am an absolute novice so thought I’d get some advice here from people who know more about!!

Am 50 - have a pretty decent pension & thinking of retiring probs in ten years or so if I can.

Due to inheritance, I’m now in the position of being able to pay off my mortgage & outstanding debts leaving me with money to invest. I’d like to start saving some of the money I would have previously paid for my mortgage into a Stocks & Shares ISA so roughly £1000 per month. Happy to leave as a long term investment so won’t need to withdraw this money at any point.

What platform would you advise? I’m veering towards Vanguard or Trading 212 as a starting point but are there any others I should consider? Are there any other fundamental things that I should think about (eg. global investments vs more UK)?

Thankyou…

If it’s managed, do check the fees. Fees can eat away horribly at any fund growth. If you had put £17k in a low-cost MSCI passive World tracker 15 years ago, and left it invested with dividends reinvested, it would be worth roughly £90,000–£95,000 today.

I have my stocks and shares ISA with Scottish Widows (they took over iWeb). I find them easy to use and low fees if you're not trading a lot.

Vanguard recently launched a new global all-cap ETF so that could be a good place to start - the ticker is VALL. It's an accumulation fund which means the dividends are automatically re-invested.

One thing I would think about as you're 50 is also having a fairly "conservative" investment as well. I have some money invested in Personal Assets investment trust (ticker PNL). Fees are much higher than for eg VALL (so 0.67% compared with 0.07%), but their whole aim is capital preservation. As well as equities it holds bonds and gold. When covid hit it was the only thing I held that didn't fall off a cliff, so can be worth holding some to smooth out volativity. My approach (and I'm in no way any sort of financial expert) would be to put your full £1000 a month into VALL (or whatever tracker you decide on) for a year or 2 and then start putting a small amount of it (whatever the minimum allowed on your chosen platform) into PNL so you end up with the majority of your money in your tracker and a small amount in PNL.