Re: Premium Bonds
Originally Posted by
galty
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Ok you suggest that my money in PB is gambling
Yep, literally throwing money away that should rightly be yours
Originally Posted by
galty
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So wear do you suggest I put that money?
This depends on whether you are prepared to put some work and effort into growing your wealth or whether you just want to sit on your arse and expect others to pay you free money.
If the latter, you can expect to get nothing but a tiny pittance of "free money".
Still many choose that option.
First I will make what should be an obvious point. Your No 1 priority is ALWAYS to pay your debts off first. Anyone who is sat there with a mortgage but who has £000s sitting in PBs is frankly a complete and utter retard. The amount of interest you could save by putting any and all amounts of spare cash into mortgage payments is staggering. It's how I paid off my mortgage very early, in my 40s.
Same goes for any other debts, esp credit cards.
Always pay those debts off as quickly as possible.
Now, assuming you are debt free your choices can include the following:
If you are prepared to put your money into a savings account and leave it there for 5 years then you can earn over 2% interest.
Examples:
Secure Trust Bank - 5 Year Fixed Rate - 2.51% AER
https://www.securetrustbank.com/5-ye...nd-22-dec-2022
Paragon Bank - 5 year Fixed Rate - 2.5% AER
https://www.paragonbank.co.uk/
Atom Bank - 5 Year Fixed Rate - 2.45%
https://www.atombank.co.uk/fixed-saver
You can earn 2% interest per year in 2 Year Fixed Rate accounts.
All of these will far outperform your PBs imo.
However if you are prepared to get financially savvy and stop being ripped off by the financial sector and effectively "do what they do", i.e. invest your money and track those investments then you can learn about stocks and shares and related matters.
You can open a share trading account with any number of companies in seconds. Then you can buy and sell shares at your whim. You can buy shares in companies that you think will do well or which you think are in an industry sector that is heading for upside. For example, at the moment the price of oil is rising again after a long period of being in the doldrums, so oil producing companies will have increased profits and will do well.
You can invest in low risk steady companies or high risk tiddlers like you find on the AIM market (the Wild West of the investment world!).
The AIM market is riddled with unscrupulous traders and there are forums out there presented as chat spaces where people discuss individual shares, but which are used as platforms for gangs and groups of large investors to heavily promote (ramp) shares they are invested in. You have to learn how they post, the language they use, their typical methods, in order to be able to become immune to the ramping nonsense. They say things like "this share will be 5p by Friday" and so on. They create a false picture of loads of people being positive about a share, (usually its the same people with multiple forum accounts) and this does sucker lots of naïve people to invest.
Once you learn how this works, how traders talk and behave and how some company CEO's behave, then you can spot opportunities to invest.
Earlier this year I bought £3000 of shares in an energy company at about 1p per share. There was a massive rise and the share price went up to 7p. That's a 6-fold increase in my investment. My £3000 of shares were suddenly worth £21,000.
You won't get that kind of return from sitting on your arse and giving your money away to Lottery and Premium Bond operators !!
I was lucky. Some other shares I bought performed dismally. There are no guarantees. Crucially though, YOU are in control of your money, no-one else.
You can do all of this with a pension too. I moved a company pension into a private SIPP so I could trade my pension pot in the stocks and shares I choose.
Everything in this world has to be worked for and earned.
Your finances are no exception. We are conditioned/brainwashed from young life and deliberately not taught how finance works. Hence most of us are hand-held and walked into debts for cars, mortgages for houses, credit cards and bank loans which we then spend years paying back.
There's a reason they don't teach you how the financial world works. It's to keep you dependent, keep you paying more than you should and to keep you a slave.
Freedom comes from getting savvy.