I can't quite believe it!

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I’m sure @porwest will agree with me on this… About 25 years ago I thought that I should try investing some money to save for the future. The problem was that I didn’t have much to spare, and knew virtually nothing about the stock market. But I did know that almost certainly, doing something would be better than doing nothing. And setting up a system to save a little something each month would be a start (the ‘Pay yourself first’ philosophy). I found that it is possible to invest in a ‘tracker fund’ – basically this automatically tracks a marker such as the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq Composite or (over here) the FTSE100, and buys and sells shares as they move into and out of these. Since it’s all automatic there is no need to pay any expensive financial analyst so the management fees are minimal. It also takes away any emotional involvement, so if prices fall you are not inclined to panic and sell at a low price. Each month your investment is the same, so if share prices go up you get fewer shares but feel good about the price rise, and if prices go down you feel bad about the price reduction but you win by being able to buy more shares. And if any of the companies pay a dividend, that money gets reinvested as well. I found a tracker fund and opted for the minimum investment of £50 a month. After a few years when my financial situation was a bit better I increased it to £100 a month. At first it didn’t do very well. The amount invested in the fund increased, obviously, as I paid into it, but share prices went down and down, so the value was pretty much the same as it would be if I had kept the money under the mattress. But at least I had it set aside, which maybe I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And I didn’t need to withdraw any cash so I just left it there and hoped for the best. Since then the situation improved and the value started to increase more and more. After 20 years the value was about double the amount I had paid in. I hadn’t checked for a while but now I’m having a bit of a start-of-year financial stock-take so I logged into the online system for a valuation – and almost fell off my chair! The value now (after 24 years) is almost triple the money I paid in. A nice result I think. It is of course possible that I could have made a better return on that money if I had chosen good stocks to invest in, but of course I could also have made a loss if I had chosen badly. And it’s quite likely that I would have dithered so much about what to do that I would never have done anything at all! So for anyone who can set aside a little bit each month and who doesn’t feel confident about doing their own stock-market trading, I recommend something like this. Doing a little something is definitely better than doing nothing, especially if you are younger - because time is most definitely on your side. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.