I have made £1.1k since I started investing. Let me talk you through it:

Welcome back to a much overdue Vanguard portfolio update here on Matt Talks Money.

Let me take you back to April 2022 to set the scene.

It is a new tax year and I want to open a new stocks and share ISA. Why you might ask? This is because I can put £20k in this account every year and any money I make in this account will be tax free when I withdraw it.

So with that decided I need a provider to open one of these accounts with and Vanguard came out on top for me personally for several reasons but the main ones being they are a huge player, millions of people trust them with their money and also they don’t have an app. Now you might be confused by this in this day in age but there is a reason behind it. 

Not having an app creates friction for me checking my investments and therefore I am likely to check them less frequently. 

Every month when I calculate my net worth, I do check in on them just to grab the current valuation but I don’t even spend a second worrying about if the number if + or - as I am investing for the long term and know that in the short term markets will fluctuate.

So in April 2022 I was ready go and with a lump sum of £5000 I started investing by putting £2500 each into the S+P 500 fund and the ftse global all cap fund.

During the making of this video I discovered a mistake I made back in 2022 but this is a good lesson that everyone makes mistakes.

Funds (a bundle of stocks and sometimes bonds) sometimes will give you two options when investing into them: accumulation and income. This refers to the dividends you will receive from companies as a reward for investing in them.

My error was investing into the S&P 500 income rather than accumulating. Why you might ask? 

Well I don’t need the income at this current moment in time and I know if I reinvest the money back into the fund which is what happens with the accum method, then I will benefit from years of compounding on those dividends. So whilst making this video I made this order to sell my S&P 500 income and buy S&P 500 accum. 

Enough of the boring stuff, lets talk about my actual return. 

So as you can see I have been investing fairly consistently since April 2022 into the ftse global all cap fund and overall from April 2022 to mid feb 2024 my rate of return is 18.81%. The important point to make is this gain is only realised if I were to sell all of my investments right now. In the future this number can and will fluctuate.

So in money terms I have invested £7,425 and this has returned me £1,122.

This % gain works about to be around 10% which is much better than any interest on any bank accounts.

So going forward what am I going to be doing? 

The answer is boring by simple: carry on 

Carry on investing monthly with the aim to increase my monthly contributions if I can. 

Thanks for sticking around until the end and see you for the next update soon!