Have your money priorities changed during lockdown?

General Chat
1

Hey All!

Now we’ve been in lockdown for an extended period of time, I was curious as to how your spending has changed. Have you put more towards emergency savings accounts? Have you repurposed money you’d planned to spend on a holiday?

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2

I’ve focused on the following;

  1. Fill my LISA to the £4k limit for the year.

  2. Channel as much into savings for my house purchase as possible.

  3. Finally do my work expenses and reclaim all that cash I’ve forgotten about.

It can feel like just moving money around rather than doing more with it, but my focus since not spending on eating out and a few drinks with friends has been “long game all the way”… I sound soooooo old. :older_man:

Saving for a family in a few years isn’t cheap :wink: :baby_bottle: :baby:

3

Eehehe, I got bored of the savings account, so opened a Freetrade one and started investing in stocks (very randomly).

4

Me and my flatmate are going to challenge each other to see who can make the most on FreeTrade only depositing £30

5

That’s cool. I’ve been enjoying platforms like Seedrs for some time, but more recently reading and researching companies before dropping my money.

I’ll try Freetrade too. I’ll head over to our referrals page, I’m sure someone has got something to share for Freetrade :slight_smile:

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How long do you have?

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I’m definitely doing this to pay off my student loan. I don’t want it hanging around - I just want it to be gone and off my back.

Until I become the winner :grin:

8

With lockdown, I’ve increased my savings every month by about £500! Really help having a job in this situation

For those of you with FreeTrade working with smaller sums of money, I would be really careful with the monthly cost of £3 for the ISA.

On an investment account with £1000 in it, it represents more than a 3% fee on your invested capital per year. You’ll be better off with an account like Degiro, which charges per trade, but comes with no fixed monthly cost. In the UK, you can make £12 300 of capital gains outside an ISA, so you realistically don’t need one unless you have 50k+ invested.

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Hey @DanRoos - I’ve taken a look over Freetrade.io and can’t see that the ISA is compulsory. I just wanted to check yourself, @edoardomoreni and @Joel haven’t experienced different?

I enjoy investing but usually leave it to others, but the boys here have inspired me to try and beat @Joel with his £30 starting investment.

10

My bad, double checked and doesn’t seem to be the case. Then definitely a good deal!

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Yes, it’s not compulsory.

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I currently use a general investment account for FreeTrade. Because it’s such a small amount I don’t need to worry about the threshold for investment income. I have my ISA with Wealthsimple - I leave the serious stuff to people who actually know what they’re doing

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13

You and your flatmate need a prize… something to motivate you towards winning :slight_smile: First to £200?

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I think we’re going to see how much we can make in 3 months. Getting to £200 from £30 without topping it up would take an age