My weekly commentary followed by my weekend news and blog links round-up.
Back in July I explained I was buying an iPhone in a post about how denying things can actually damage your wealth (within reason!)
My millions of fans You obviously took it literally, because iPhones had become gold dust in the UK by the time I got around to buying one.
O2 hasn’t had any for weeks — I suspect because Vodafone and others are being stocked up ahead of their rumoured October iPhone launches, although some say they’ll only get old models.
Anyway, I eventually got mine from the Apple store; the last 32GB model left in London that day!
There were other hassles, and on activation my phone even turned German until I slapped it about a bit. Nobody wants to see that. It made me realise how easy I find it to save money because shopping is such a pain in the neck.
This is part of a series on why borrowing to invest is rarely worthwhile.
Let’s imagine you remortgage your home to release £100,000 that you can repay over 20 years.
- You borrow at a great rate of 6%
- The loan is fixed for 20 years
- You invest in the index for its average 10% a year long-term returns
… and then you pocket the 4% difference, right?
Not so fast.
It’s fair to say Mike Piper has made oblivious investing his own over on his Oblivious Investor blog.
Having coined the phrase, he had a head start, of course!
And with the publication of his new book Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise
The Alternative Investment Market (AIM for short) was set-up in 1995 as a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange.
AIM enables smaller companies to obtain a public listing for their shares at a fraction of the cost and with less regulation than on the main market.
Over 3,000 companies have been listed on AIM since it opened.
AIM can be a rich hunting ground for private UK investors looking for bargains, since shares listed on AIM are less well researched than on the main market, and many are too small for fund managers to bother with.
This is part of a series on why borrowing to invest isn’t really a great idea.
The first article in this series saw me admitting that even though I hate debt, it isn’t hard to see the apparent attraction of:
- Borrowing a suitcase stuffed with money
- Sticking it in the stock market for 20 years for the historical average annual rate of return of 10%, then…
- Spending the rest of your life telling people around a pool in the Virgin Islands how clever you were 20 years ago.
The rest of these articles are going to pop that balloon.
Firstly, let’s start with the cost of your debt.
