Savings/investments - what next? Any advice please?

[LemonSqueezy0]

Just looking for some advice on how to move forward with saving money, and maximising the interest. We aren't talking 100s of thousands, but I'd still like to maximise what we do have.
We've maxed out on the savings/interest in the current high interest current accounts as we have reached the highest amounts allowed and In any case have used up the Direct Debits we have that are needed to satisfy the T&C Of those accounts. We have more than enough saved there to have covered our salaries in event of redundancy, illness etc as well as insurances etc.

We now have a minimum of a £1,000 a month that we could save/invest and that we wouldn't necessarily need instant access to.
Any ideas please?

Have you paid off your mortgage? As savings rates are low, generally the most cost effective way to save is to overpay your mortgage.

By high interest accounts do you mean ISAs? Would generally be next step to save on tax.

Hi, yes mortgage is a relatively small amount and forms part of a high interest rate we have on one of the accounts, so wouldn't save us anything to overpay in order to clear it. Each ISA has Maximum amount in which is why I'm struggling to think what to do next, as I'm not sure we can do anything else - it seems not quite enough to go to a financial advisor but all the obvious day to day/ common accounts etc I think we have.

If you're under 40 and don't need to access the money have you looked at the lifetime ISAs? You can save up to £4K a year and the government adds to it. Downside is you can't access it until you're 60 without a penalty.

I also invest a small amount (c£200) monthly into funds (mix of tracker and global equities) which gives a bit of exposure to stock market but without too much risk. Over the last year since I've been doing it my returns are around 14%.

Pensions? Assuming you don't have a final salary pension it is quite scary how much money you need in a pension to get a decent income at retirement. The ratio is about 30:1 if you get an index linked one I think.

So a fund of £1m will only give you about £33k at retirement. (A million pounds!! And not much more than average earnings!! How can that be?!?)

So you've got money in cash savings accounts, but it sounds like none in the stock market. Long term having stocks is generally one of the best investments - they've done ridiculously well in the last 18 months as a pp has said, so there may well be some dramatic drops to come, but if you're looking long term it's a great way to get growth. I agree with BlueMarble that you could start putting money monthly into a low cost tracker fund which tracks the market as a whole.

However, I also recommend going to an investment advisor, as I've found you can usefully get their input with much less money than you might think.

Thanks for the advice -

Pensions are paid up, and overpaid for many years, with both having generous schemes with our employers but as an extra precaution we have also invested in another property that we rent out and think of that as part of our pension pot. We aren't even banking on having our state pension by the time we retire..

I'd be very interested in stocks and shares. Do you recommend speaking to an IFA about that, or do you think with a bit of research, I could go it alone? I have no idea where to start, but very willing to learn! Definitely at the point where we could take a bit more of a risk and definitely able to invest long term...

Have a read around and get more confident in terms of what your options are. You can manage it yourself, and invest in a tracker fund which will track the market and go up and down with the market as a whole. These are much cheaper as they pay lower management fees as they arent 'actively managed' (i.e. Someone selecting the stocks) but instead just have 'one of everything' to track the market as a whole.

I did my savings and investments alone for years and did moderately well (much better than leaving it in cash), but I've done hugely better since I passed it all over to an investment advisor, and now regret that I didn't do that years ago. I thought I'd need to have loads of money to go to an advisor, but actually my savings had built up over the years to a point where it was worthwhile.