Investing vs Saving : Risk vs Reward?

Following on from my last blog about the eroding power of inflation I need to find ways to outwit its destructive nature in order to get closer to my goal year on year. However, from a young age I thought the best way to gets of money was to put it into a savings account and earn interest whilst the concept of 'investing' was alien to me and something only the very wealthy did. I couldn't have been further from the truth; nowadays you can invest with as little as £1 from the comfort of your phone!

My first stab at investing was on a drizzly Friday afternoon in my sixth form study room when me and my friend Jack decided to buy some bitcoin in the hope it would increase in value. By some miracle two months afterwards in December 2017 the price had nearly doubled so our combined investment of £200 had turned into £385 - but we got lucky because a month or two later bitcoins price plummeted. Here's a screenshot from my notes page of how much bitcoin we bought back in 2017.

More recently I have started investing some money into the app Freetrade into some well known companies and some into less well known companies after research into their financial statements and having seen potential increase in share prices. Companies financial statements look confusing at first glance but after a few quick YouTube videos, it becomes very easy to find the useful data and ignore the majority of the data. If you don't know what to invest in then index funds are a safer option as they contain a lot fo companies in one fund so your risk is diversified. The most famous index fund is the S & P 500 which has historically made 8% returns over the last 80 years, far better than interest earned in a bank..

Comments

Net worth tracking

Ever since I read ‘Secrets of a millionaire mind’ I was inspired to track my net worth monthly and meticulously budget each month. Net worth simply means the value of everything you own of value minus anything you owe. I’ve found that, since I’ve started recording it monthly, it has been increasing every month. I like to think that, every time I make a financial decision, my subconscious mind is saying ‘remember what the calculations will add up to on the first of the month.’ Here is the link to the sheet I use to track my net worth : http://www.millionairemindbook.com/media/NetWorthTrackingBookBonus.pdf In a fortnights time I’ll tell you about a book that changed my perception on making money...

New Year, Old Tricks!

It's finally a New Year after a testing 2020 but if it taught me one thing, it was that commerce is quickly moving online and as such this will the way forward for the next few years. But more on this in a later blog... New Year, Old Tricks. At the end of 2020, I came across a company called UniTaskr who will pay you for doing certain online jobs but their main objective is helping with social media 'shout outs'. After a quick check to see if your social media passes their requirements, they give you some content to post on your Instagram and then 24 hours later you send them the results and they send you some easy cash! Here was an example I took part in promoting Spotify: And here was the payment: Some may say £6 isn't much and I agree with you but £6 for doing nothing but 5 minutes work whilst watching Nexflix that can pay for my next 2 meal deals from Tesco, I'm not complaining! If you want to make some easy cash definitely check Uni...

Pi Crypto

Remember the craze of bitcoin at the back end of 2017 when a single coin was worth $18,000? Well, only 4 years prior, a bitcoin was worth a mere $123 in October of 2013. Imagine if you had bought a bitcoin for just over $100 and in a few years it was worth 180 times that. Now go a step further and ask yourself what if that bitcoin you paid $100 for, could be free to acquire and that all you needed was an app. Let me introduce you to Pi. No, not the mathematical constant 3.14... or just a badly spelt version of a yummy dessert. Pi is a new version of cryptocurrency aimed at using social circles to not leave people out of the next big thing and also to make cryptocurrency mining more accessible and cheaper. to earn Pi, all you have to do is log onto the app every 24 hours and press mine. Currently Pi, as a currency. is worth virtually nothing but everything starts off that way and in 5 years time even if 1 Pi is worth 10p, I would at this very moment have £250 worth of Pi with...

Matt Talks Money.

Search This Blog