The Underscore Archives

On 13 Feb 2008, at 01:43, Oliver Humpage wrote:

> On 13/2/08 09:28, "Aaron Trevena" <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A. (who might be bitter that the muppets in the stock market turned
>> his thousands of pounds of pension contributions over the last
>> finanicial year into a 260 quid loss)
>
> I never got round to organising a pension, partly because of things  
> like
> that. Still don't trust them. But the 30th birthday looms this year...
>
> Anyone found a good way of not ending up decrepit and broke in old  
> age for
> not ridiculous amounts of outlay?

I spent a while about 10 years back looking at stuff like this in  
relation to mortgages... and became a big fan of The Motley Fool..  
they had some good articles on their site, I think somewhere I even  
have a book from them too...

Anyways... I ended up going for a CAT index-linked ISA.  Basically a  
computer sits there and sticks you money in shares for you based on  
the performance of the stock market as a whole.  The idea being that  
whilst a human *might* be able to do a better job, they also might  
screw it all up (ed: which computers can't right?).  The key point  
being that the index-linked one only costs, say, 1% in management  
fees verses, say, 5% for a meatbag to do the transactions.  That 4%  
different makes a big different overall in compound interest, and  
outweighs any advantage a human investing might have (unless they get  
lucky).  This was all looking over a 25 year timeframe, btw.   
Although mortgages do have a better tax advantage I heard... but  
still... yeah... I don't trust them.

-Matt

-- 
Matt Hamilton                                       matth at netsight.co.uk
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