Advise me on investing as an average earner

[Peonyyyy]

I keep seeing that I need to be investing, but I’m not a high earner. I work part time (gross annual £34k) and my husband earns £40k. I also have a side hustle but the income from that varies widely, can be anything from an extra £10k a year to just £2k. We have two children, nursery fees and a house with a mortgage. We also pay around £200 a month for a PCP car and have student loan repayments. We live in the south of England and our mortgage is £1200 a month. We have about £150k left on our mortgage.

How would you advise I invest some money for both myself for retirement/later years and also for our children?

is it realistic that we could make a good amount of money or is all this stuff I’m seeing online only worth it for high earners? Pretty clueless about this stuff but I want to learn. I want to feel ‘comfortable’.

thanks in advance!

All valid points.
A AI crash is a when not if.
However like with the dot com crash the market will recover in the long term.

Just to clarify (from a few previous comments) that any pension wrapper means you get tax relief not just workplace ones. This is automatically added at the basic rate, if you're a higher rate taxpayer then if you're putting it in a non workplace pension you need to claim the extra back from HMRC.

Go and see a financial advisor. Make sure they are fully independent and whole of market

You don’t give your age, but DH and I opened S&S LISAs 5 years ago, we are keeping them for when we retire, we started with £25 a month each and we’ve increased it a bit (now pay £100 and £150 in) but with the tax relief and growth we’ve got £35k! I had invested it in AJ Bell’s global growth which has gone up 33% in past 12 months 🥳.
Its a long term plan as you can’t access it until 60 but if your employer doesn’t match extra pension contributions it’s better tax wise for a basic rate tax payer than a pension as you get 20% effective tax relief on the way in and tax free growth /withdrawals when you take it out. A pension only 25% of withdrawals are tax free.
Weve also got a small emergency fund (only 2 months salary) and we save £300 a month between us into general S&S ISA for long term. I decided more than 2 months emergency wasn’t necessary, we can access the S&S ISA if we need to. We saved the emergency fund 8 years ago and have never touched it as we’ve got a sinking fund for the house/car etc.

The market is particularly risky at the moment. People always say this. Every year. If it's high, it's about to burst, if it's low it's because it's in trouble.

Also comparing to Warren Buffett is patently ridiculous. Berkshire Hathaway has an entirely different model than the average investor.

You also seem to be suggesting that individual stocks are preferable to an index fund?

Feel free to ignore the risks if you want, but others deserve to be warned. If you think that the market is risky right now, just because it’s high, then you clearly understand nothing about bond markets and the macroeconomic situation.

I’m a stock picker because I like to know exactly what I’m buying, evaluate individual companies, and to decide exactly what to sell and when. Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who doesn’t want to invest the time, but equally, just buying the SP500 is a highly concentrated risk, and people should understand that.

This is true, the market eventually recovers, but people should be aware that it can potentially take years to recover. This is ok if you can stay just invested, but problematic for people who might potentially need to take money out (if faced with redundancy etc), or who are close to retirement.

Everyone should absolutely be aware of the risks when investing. However, my point to the OP is that while there is inherent risk in investing, there's also always someone saying it's particularly risky at that moment, regardless of what the market is doing.

If you want to warn the OP then you may want to be more explicit - the OP can then mitigate, manage or accept the risks involved. Not ignore.

My comment on markets being high etc was clearly an example of the types of things said to put people off. I wasn't suggesting that was my view or your view, particularly as you hadn't actually expounded on that.