what to do with 10K

[stooz]

How useful would the £10k be in a share ISA? I am interested. What sort of returns do they offer, and are they tied in for x years etc?

[melonfool]

How useful would the £10k be in a share ISA? I am interested. What sort of returns do they offer, and are they tied in for x years etc?

Share ISAs do not 'offer returns' as such, you put the money in (for as long as you want) and you buy shares, or funds, or bonds, or trusts within the ISA wrapper. Some of *those* might have fixed returns and some might have fixed start and end dates. These are also the sorts of things any private pension you have will be invested in so you might want to ensure you are not duplicating holdings which could cause risk issues.

If you put money into an equity ISA you need to make decisions about what to invest it in - which comes down to your attitude to risk, when you might need the money, what you expect from it.

I have a mix of single company shares (like, say, Shell), Investment Trusts, Exchange Traded Funds and Vanguard bonds.

New investors are usually pointed toward tracker funds which invest in types of market (say, the FTSE250, FTSE100 etc) and just follow the trend of the market with no human intervention.

One might also wonder if it's a good idea to put £10k in at once, or to drip it in £1k pm. The latter might give some evening out and help prevent committing all your cash during a price spike. But there is a buying fee usually so drip feeding costs more for that reason.

It's a really complex topic.

Mel

[StepOne]

What about peer-to-peer? Funding Circle forecasts returns of 7% after all fees, bad debts etc. Their default option now spreads the lending across over 100 companies, so the risk is somewhat reduced although could still suffer in a recession I guess.

I recently signed up with 5k and so far so good, although very early days.

StepOne