17, £1500. What to do?

Financial Chat
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Hi there

through a mixture of 2 switching bonuses, christmas dough, freelance web dev, I have roughly £1500

it’s currently sitting in a poxy 2% ISA, a so-called “Loyalty” one

Just mindful inflation means that i’m losing money, and with the Loyality ISA I can transfer out immediately, forgive me, but impulse control is lacking due to mitigating circumstances and I need some way around it

I wish my provider could provide say a 24 hour cool-off on transfers out. I also wish I wasn’t losing money to inflation

Any suggestions?
NanoOp

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Hi and Welcome :wave:

The below link might help you to decide what to do with it. Consider an easy access pot where you have to wait to get to it//fixed term pot either with Monzo or elsewhere.

Savings rates are not great in most places, you may wish to consider just leaving it where it is since you won’t really notice a difference between 2 and for example 2.75% anyway with an amount such as that.

Hope this helps

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Try not to let inflation worry you, it’s real of course and if you put that £1500 under your bed then came back to it upon retirement you’d be able to buy less with it, but in real terms, gaining interest on it is the best thing you can do to “fight back”

There are many accounts that limit/punish you for withdrawals.

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As already mentioned there are several options with this. I have a few accounts with Zopa which isn’t the best but not by anyway bad.

You could check out Moneysaving Expert or AndyCleverCash websites for a better view through the options. Mind you there are those, on this forum, who think Andy it the spawn of the Devil!

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If you’re under 18, I’d open Santander 123 Mini which would pay 3% on this balance

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17 yr old me would (did) blow nearly half of it on a portable cd player that played mp3s off a rewritable cd (worst investmemt ever in hindsight and i was probably the only early adopter to buy this junk) and the rest on going out partying for 30 nights in a row one summer (was 18 by then)

If i had another shot at being 17 and having £1500, id buy a gold britannia ounce from the royal mint and forget about it.

As you get older (or maybe as you become more refined with investing) you become.aware that you need core, illiquid but stable assets to call upon in case of emergency or just to be the bedrock of your portfolio. Gold is a great inflation hedge over the long term as you can see from a historical chart vs the pound or dollar or whatever currency you can think of.

If you do plan to spend it at some point soon like any normal 17 year old who is not the future martin lewis, then id suggest a fixed savings account to lock it away and think about it.

I wouldnt worry too much about inflation now. In your life you are probably going to have over £1m income so poaaibly losing a couple hundred quid early on by being cautious is a cheap price to pay in the grand scheme.

Do let us know what you decide and keep us updated in the future if you can.

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Whaaaat? I had one which I think was about £20 or something.

Anyway OP what you do is down to you, sensible to have some away for emergencies/house deposit/etc but at your age blowing it up the wall on life is probs what I would’ve done.

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Aw man now i feel even worse! It was about £4-500 from argos if i recall. I remember paying in cash and taking ages to count it out. Perhaps you got yours a bit later when there was more supply or perhaps argos saw my 17 year old pockets bulging from a mile off :joy:

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Mine probs wasn’t as fancy. Anywho, fun times…

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Hi there, thank you for everybody’s ideas. I am going to try my best to respond to everyone, truly appreciate it :slight_smile:

Right, @JIMMWX, you are totally correct, the savings rates are shockingly poor, (maybe that’s not how you worded it), ha, so Easy Access wise maybe I am better keeping it where I am… most of those are either slightly lower than what I have currently with HSBC, or slightly higher and not worth the bank’s painful application process for minors, or not available to me yet until age 18.

@Revels, I mean you’re likely right… however I don’t tend to be able to let myself just simply accept that, lol, we’ll come back to alternatives later.

@N26throwaway, unless they have changed it, Barclays rainy day saver requires both Blue Rewards and an ‘eligible account’, their minor’s account aka ‘Young Person’s Account’ is essentially a Barclays Bank Account with any overdraft stripped out, all the in-app features, online is the same, same card etc… I believe they have ‘no credit footprint internally’ according to Barclays, either way, it isn’t eligible for Blue Rewards, even if I met the pay in - sadly.

In relation to your second point, Sir MacMonier, yes I considered this, bought a 4K BenQ Monitor and a Ryzen 5 PC and had around £700 left. I felt it was impulsive and wrong and kept beating myself up about it, and that’s why Amazon have now refunded 1 out of 2 purchases (so far).

@michaelw90, yes months ago I looked at Zopa, and you know what, it’s damn well perfect when we go back to my original thread posting, it adds a lovely bit of friction. But sadly, again not until the end of the year.

@Kershaw I like Martin Lewis’ site, been following for years on all sorts you might not expect one to be dealing with at 17 :wink:

@N26throwaway Yep, you seem to have cottoned on the age restrictions now, AND yes you are right, Monzo partners do not require me to be 18, allow friction in the form of a 24 hour period (i.e Oaknorth etc)… I am not eligible for Monzo and they won’t tell me why.

Course you were 18, we believe you. As for the CD Walkman thing it sounds glorious ha ha, as long as you were listening exclusively to Girls Aloud & Spice Girls or something… did you have a thing for Sophie Ellis-Bextor?

Gold… don’t know, see, I have done research in various places and I totally agree with you, and I know in the long term it would be good for me. I have serious issues with seeing the long term in a broad sense, without saying too much on a public forum, and frankly that’s probably why I’ve not put it into a commodity thus far.

@JIMMWX, @rarther, I still have a Sony CD Walkman from years ago, before I was a teenager, now has anyone heard of Motown? :slight_smile:

I can sell it to you for £4-500 as I reckon like at Argos your pockets are still bulging.

I have tried my best to address everyone, shouldn’t have let the replies pile up, however, here we are - let me know if I have missed anyone!

P.s: I wrote a rudimentary draft of a CV, if anyone is willing to look at it, I’d be happy, wanting to get a customer service job and some dough quickly, if only part time

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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @monzobot display help.

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He’s not a Knight is he? Is he?

@monzobot fortune

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:crystal_ball: As I see it, yes

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I like it. Looks good on you :slight_smile:

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@rarther Forgive me for being an idiot, what is the difference between buying X amount of gold bullion from the Royal Mint & using something like Tally for Current/Savings account (did you see Tally Money)

It looks super cool and fintechy and I think I might try it when I turn 18.

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Hey! Not too familiar with Tally and it may be a great thing (try out with a small amount and see if it works for you), but what i would say is that physical gold, silver, copper and other physical metals have been the main stores of value (along with land and other hard assets) for humans for the vast majority of the last 3-5000 years. Recency bias will encourage buying houses and index funds to store your capital but the huge longevity of metals as a store of value through history is inescapable.

Crypto currency has been mainstream for about 6-10 years and Tally Money appears to have been founded in 2015, so it could well be a great place to store your capital and could be the future of money, but it certainly doesn’t have a lot of track record through history.

The key benefits of physical metal in your hands are:
-no counterparty risk. If it is held by someone else or some organisation, bank or vault operator as collateral to support a crypto currency then what happens if the custodian of that crypto does not keep the gold as safe as they are meant to and makes some risky bets with your capital before fleeing to the Bahamas, then this counterparty risk could lead to 100% loss.

That doesn’t just apply to cryptos. If you are investing in GLD or SLV funds then you are trusting that JP Morgan or HSBC are going to deliver your metal when you need it even though you can see there is huge leverage, speculation and all sorts of funny business going on and the prospectus doesn’t even allow for conversion to physical.

I also store capital with Bullionvault which allows you to own gold in vaults around the world, even though i know there is a counterparty risk. They purposely have vaults with different operators in different countries because most investors using them understand that a government of any jurisdiction could decide to pass a law making the gold in that vault theirs (happened many times in history). If the gold is in your hands then no one can mis-appropriate it or lose it on your behalf (still the chance of theft of course, which is the major elephant in the room with owning physical metals, and the way to protect against this is to have security measures and to diversify and not keep all your eggs in one basket)

-illiquid…you can sell it if you need to but unlike with shares or an instrument tracking spot prices etc you wont be shaken out of any trees or tempted to churn your investments around or chase gainz and shiny things like you will be elsewhere. If you have a gold coin and hide away it for 10 or 20 years, whatever the new fiat price is its going to buy you roughly the same amount of stuff as you could buy today. That might not sound like a great return, but it is such low risk and it does not need to be all of your capital, just a bedrock amount which will be the core of your portfolio and provide you with security and emergency capital if you ever need it, or if you never do then this can become the bedrock of your childrens portfolios and provide them with the safety and security too.
If you choose to have something more liquid,like Tally or Bullionvault, then you are keeping the option open to easily convert it to fiat and chase shiny things or spend it on rewritable cd players.

As mentioned before, the liquid option might be your preference as a young person who might want to dip in and reap some of the rewards from time to time, but if it were me having my time again then i would just buy 1 gold britannia and forget about, then spend my next £1500 on cryptos or shares or whatever i fancied.

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