What was your reasoning for splitting the 2 LS funds? You wanted an effective 10% bonds? If so, that’s fine. If not, you may want to think about what your desired risk level is and pick just one of them.
What was your reasoning for overweighting your son’s portfolio toward Europe? Why didn’t this reasoning apply to your daughter? There’s nothing “wrong” with overweighting to a particular region (the LS funds themselves are overweighted toward the UK), but you should understand the potential risk of that bet going against you. If you have conviction it’s the right way to go, it should be the right way to go for all your investments (though this seems to be a static one-off buy of possibly a small amount, so maybe you were just “trying it out”?).
Vanguard don’t yet offer a SIPP. The most important thing with pensions is getting salary sacrifice and matches. If your current employer won’t sacrifice in to your own SIPP, it may work out more beneficial for you to salary sacrifice in to their own scheme. If your current employer will match your own contributions into their own scheme if you put your £60 there instead of Pensionbee, again, you’re better off going that route.
Only when you can’t get anything more out of your own employer would you contribute to a SIPP or a (retirement) LISA.
I had a brief look at Pensionbee’s plans, and they all seem to be UK biased (again, which might be OK). Beyond that I’ve never investigated pension-specific age-adjusting funds or their performance because I have a defined benefit pension. So I can’t say how Pensionbee compares to their competition.
Personally if I had a SIPP (having exhausted my employers benefits) I’d stick with a global tracker and just increase bonds/cash weighting by a percent every year. Simple, understandable, and in theory ought to do better long term than any of these complex pension funds. But again, I haven’t researched this area properly.
Been a carer for my son for nearly 2 years so been putting £60 a month from my carers allowance into PensionBee, started as a sole trader as of 01/07 so will see what happens with that for my pension
I think I read somewhere re the LifeStrategy in a previous forum topic on Monzo, as you can see my son has a considerable amount more than his sister so thought I would add the extra EU fund, I was also trying to add the VWRL on a monthly bases for both but I found out they dont do fractional shares for it so ended up splitting it the monthly payments via the LifeStrategies.
As these are Child ISA’s they are not going to be touched for 9 & 11 years so is deffo a long term.
My son is upto about £120 “profit” my daugher about £20 “profit”.
So I am thinkikng that I sell all current stocks put the max I can for each in VWRL with the current anount of cash, then say the £25 a month goes directly to the EU SRI fund?
For me personally, instead of adding £60 into Pension be be add it to the VWRL fund in vanguard and see how it goes?
Obviuosly, I do everything at my own risk and only asking for info
Ok, so if you have to take care of your pension 100% by yourself, your choices are something like PensionBee, where you trust their management to do a good job with your investments, and pay them lots of money for that, or you get a SIPP and pick funds yourself, where you have the potential to outperform PensionBee for less fees.
As with the the robo-advisor discussion above, there’s no reason to believe the people at PensionBee are any better than investing in a global index tracker, and some reason to believe they’ll be worse.
Be careful about picking funds due to recent (or indeed any length) returns. So Europe happened to give better returns than a UK-focussed fund. Will it in the future? Not always, almost certainly. If you buy more of the high-performing Europe fund now, you are effectively buying at a high price. If 5 years from now you notice that it is underperforming LS, and you are still picking and switching funds on the basis of recent past performance, you would end up selling Europe when it is low, and buying LS when it is high.
Buying high and selling low is an excellent way of destroying your wealth.
It is safer to not place any bets on which region will do well in the future, and just buy them all, weighted by cap. That’s what VWRL and the Global all-cap fund are for. VWRL is an ETF and has the fractional problem you noted, but the Global all-cap fund is not, so you can buy exact amounts of it. It doesn’t have any UK or Europe bias. It is also potentially better than VWRL since it includes smaller companies.
You would not use Vanguard Investor (the platform) to invest in VWRL (or the global all-cap) for your pension, because a SIPP is better for this purpose, and they don’t offer a SIPP account. A SIPP gives you 20% tax relief, with more relief possible at higher earning levels. This 20% (or the 25% bonus from a LISA) is going to beat any stock market gains you could get in a S&S ISA.
Re pension look to add it to a SIPP and top up as I have been doing instead of the Robo advisor (obviously need to check exit fees too) any company you would recommend?
So on Vanguard where the current kids ISA’s are best option as it is not fractional would be the FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund Accumulation? If I wanted to take that router?
The right company for you will depend on your particulars. You can find a table comparison of fees here, and a nice guide to SIPPs with recommended companies here. I’m going to guess that AJ Bell are going to be best for you. But do your own math.
Yes. My daughter’s JISA is with Vanguard Investor and 100% in ‘FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund Accumulation’.
But I should make clear that I am not a financial advisor and you should do your own research.
You can have multiple SIPPs, so it might be worth considering trialling a Vanguard SIPP or even just leaving the Pensionbee one dormant and transferring later.
Off the top of my head, protection for each SIPP/institution is 85k, so also to consider if you’ll hit that down the line in one place
I believe that those who are able to do it themselves, and above all, those who are constant, do not need tools like roboadvisors.
Finding out about the 2 or 3 ETFs that should be bought a little at a time throughout life is quite easy.
When in doubt, I might as well rely on the very trivial Vanguard LifeStrategy to simplify.
The problems are 2.
1 being constant
2 not to panic if the markets fall.
That’s why I don’t disdain putting a part of my assets invested by a roboadvisor or two.
Nutmeg is very good and since last year also moneyfarm which is quite unknown but has good reviews online about returns ( https://www.revenue.land/moneyfarm ).
As always, past returns are no indication of future returns, in fact sometimes they are bad luck!
I’m not sure if there’s a better place for this but recently I’ve been looking for a better place to manage how I buy stocks.
Which led me to IG. I’d used them previously when I had a brief dabble with FX. I’ve been told they also bought Freetrade? which means that it’s essentially free to buy stocks via them (you can avoid the platform fee by doing three trades a quarter).
Anyone else using them? If not is there an even better alternative?
