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What caught my eye this week.
I read a short story when I was a teenager that unsettles me to this day.
It featured an everyday American town, only everyone there was beholden to this one particular kid. Even the adults would watch what they said and did around him.
To spoil the twist, it turned out the kid was born with godlike powers.
The town, and the chunk of the planet it sat on, was adrift in space somewhere after he’d dislocated it from the planet. The lives of the survivors living in this bubble now revolved around the child, although they tried desperately to pretend that life was normal.
Obviously the worst of it was their deity was a three-year old child, not a wise all-seeing superpower.
The kid-god was insecure, arbitrary, unpredictable, spiteful, prone to deadly tantrums, and generally mentally ill-equipped for the job.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
Trump TV
Look at a chart of the S&P 500 this week and you’ll find that US shares closed much higher.
Perhaps some Panglossian observers see a good week for the markets, like the town folk in that story pretended they were living a good life.
Passive purists will see more evidence to ignore the noise and keep buying.
But experienced, the week was a rollercoaster ride driven by the kind of crazy plot lines and reversals you’d expect to find – not coincidentally – in a season of WWE Wrestling.
We’re all degenerate meme traders now
I won’t run through the ups and downs. If you care about market drama, you saw them unfold.
Ditto Trump’s tariffs. If you haven’t read enough of the millions of words written by now to convince you of their sheer stupidity, this post won’t tip the balance.
But for two weeks the market has given us real-time pricing on just how damaging this plank of Trump’s agenda would be. The Nasdaq and very nearly the S&P 500 plunged into a bear market, before rallying on Trump declaring a 90-day pause for most of them.
Below is a daily price chart of that reaction. Remember these are multi-trillion cap indices – not illiquid meme coins – rising as much as 12% in a day:
What a killer run for Trump TV, watched around the world!
Personally I found it even more exciting than the one where his supporters invaded the US capital a few seasons ago.
It’s much more thrilling when you’ve skin in the game.
And the subplots!
The pseudonymous ‘Walter Bloomberg’ X account that promoted the ‘fake’ story the tariffs would be paused for 90-days, whipsawing markets by $2.5 trillion in half an hour as it was believed and then denied!
The arch-villain China slapping back with even more tariffs of its own!
Then Trump apparently being inspired by Walter’s fake ‘pause’ and actually implementing a 90-day delay. Possibly only after he watched a bank boss fretting on Fox TV!
This isn’t even to get into how these enormously consequential announcements are being made via Trump’s Truth Social account. Rather than, you know, the White House.
Or even accusations for potential nation-scale insider trading based on Trump telling his supporters it was a good time to buy stocks, shortly before the market ripped 10% on his latest not-Tweet.
Personally, I don’t think it can be insider trading when it’s done in public.
But also, what a quaint thing to worry about these days…
Do you even lift, bro?
Perhaps my favourite bit involved all the NPCs / billionaire tech and finance bros battling on social media. Especially Trump supporter and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who went from warning the tariffs would cause an ‘economic nuclear winter’ one day, to praising Trump for a textbook ‘art of the deal’ later.
I’m with AQR founder Cliff Asness who replied that:
“For me, one of the main benefits of making some money is not having to wear a gimp suit for anybody.”
But I suppose Ackman is in too deep to recant.
Black Mirror Monday
At the risk of sounding exactly like someone who complains that WWE Wrestling is not a real sport – and thus who piously reveals that they don’t get the joke – it’s a bit sickening to me that this entire charade has become normalised in just a few short months.
Well I’m having none of it. This is not normal, and it’s not a brilliant way to shape US economic policy, let alone re-route the world.
It’s mindlessly stupid. The tariffs would plunge us into a depression if implemented, whereas they only have us flirting with recession when teased and (partly) retracted.
Listen, if the US wants to turn itself into an autarky run by an autocrat, go for it. I don’t believe the US public voted for that – and it would impoverish most people there, especially the poor – but that’s its (bad) business.
But let’s not pretend the case for free trade wasn’t made 200 years ago. And not just in theory – the world, and especially the US, has mostly grown crazy rich on the benefits.
You might as well declare you’ve doubts about the theory of steam engines.
Then again, 10% of the US electorate believes the Earth is flat, so perhaps they would.
In most cases for most countries at most times tariffs are bad.
Trump’s sky-high tariffs for the US are idiotic, and even as a threat they will have consequences.
No serious CEO will have begun to move factories to the US last weekend based on Trump’s earnest declarations that tariffs were ‘beautiful’ and here to stay and set to reinvigorate US manufacturing and all the rest.
Yet the unfolding farce will still be affecting millions of decisions up and down the supply chain.
To give one tiny example, the UK’s Character Group – the maker of Peppa Pig plushies – withdrew market guidance this week.
As This Is Money reports:
Character, which manufactures Teletubbies toys and the largest range of Peppa Pig products, told investors on Friday its ‘ability to assess the financial implications’ of tariffs has been ‘considerably obscured’ by escalating retaliatory measures.
The New Malden-based group predominantly counts the UK and Scandinavia as its key markets, but US sales made up about 20% of turnover last year.
The UK will face so-called ‘baseline’ tariffs of 10%, but much of Character’s manufacturing comes from China where exporters to the US now face levies of 145%.
Character Group is set-up just like millions of other companies around the world that took advantage of global trade to improve production and lower prices.
So we can only imagine all the similar decisions being made globally to pause output, and to suspend investment and expansion.
It sums up why markets hate uncertainty. It’s not because traders are lily-livered. It’s because the economic damage is real, and just as bad un-priceable.
Ah, Mr Bond Vigilantes, we’ve been expecting you
There’s not point re-litigating the brutal inanity of US policy every Saturday morning. This is going to go on for years, and attention is all Trump wants anyway.
But on that note perhaps the one good development this week was the potential re-emergence of the so-called bond vigilantes:
We all know former real estate bankruptcy Donald Trump loves cheap debt. So maybe rising bond yields did force his hand towards a pause, rather than, say, Ackman’s whining.
Of course, as Cullen Roche notes there’s a lot going on with US bonds:
The 10-year interest rate ripped from 3.9% up to 4.5% in four trading sessions. As I write it’s now back to where it was nine trading sessions ago at 4.3%.
So, we whipped way lower and then went way higher.
Again, it’s all uncertainty. No one knows where inflation and the economy is going. If inflation rips higher then bond yields will follow. If the economy rips lower then bond yields will follow.
But we’re in totally uncharted territory because we’ve never had the entire global economy at the mercy of a single unpredictable person writing Tweets sporadically.
I talked to some of the largest bond traders in the world in recent days and they’re all so perplexed about it. They described it as “chaos”, “uncertainty”, “madness”. There are theories floating around about carry trade unwinds, funds imploding, China selling and just bidless markets.
I suspect it’s a lot of all of these things. But the uncertainty of it all is the main issue. No one knows where any of this is headed and if you’re someone trying to lend money or set prices in the coming months then good luck guessing where you should be.
Trump’s supporters don’t care less that China ultimately buying a lot less US stuff would mean it would have far less need to hold shedloads of US treasuries.
Nor that unwinding China’s US debt stockpile would see US rates soar, crippling US households.
Remember, this is television! Don’t get hung up on reality.
The Mad King
Indeed as it’s presently unfolding, US exceptionalism is getting downgraded at a speed that would embarrass a B-Movie scriptwriter.
The only thing that’s different about the tariffs mayhem compared to the rest of the MAGA/Trump agenda, is it comes with real-time pricing. The damage is marked-to-market.
As blogger ermine puts it, the US is rapidly transitioning from having a POTUS to having a KOTUS, at least in practice.
A man whose daily utterances moves trillions in the markets. And who is checked mostly not by conventional counterbalances, but by the japes of sanctioned court jesters.
Fun and games
So in the spirt of the times – and since it’s all a game nowadays anyway – I asked ChatGPT for an appropriate toy:
I can’t wait to play with him next time.
Historians may someday look back and find something good to say about this entire episode.
They turned the murderous Genghis Khan into a nation-builder, after all.
Perhaps in some needlessly damaging way, this week really will eventually be seen as an idiotically-implemented check in the very-definitely authoritarian China’s rise to power, for instance.
Even forest fires do some good in the long-run.
It’s just your bad luck to find yourself in the middle of one.
Have a great weekend.
“A voluntary levy paid by those who distrust their heirs more than they dislike the Inland Revenue.”
– Roy Jenkins
The previous article I wrote on inheritance tax was my most commented on yet. Inheritance tax (IHT) must be really popular!
So let’s have some more…
Do you remember our fictional friends Sarah and Stephen from that last post?
Just like them I’ve found myself quietly panicking about my family’s potential inheritance tax exposure, spurred on by the looming inclusion of residual pension assets in the inheritance tax net.
I’ve long grasped the basics of inheritance tax planning:
- Potentially Exempt Transfers (PETs), aka ‘the seven-year rule’
- The joys of ‘regular gifts from surplus income’
- How ISA wrappers pass (somewhat) intact to your spouse
- The intricate (read: maddening) dance between IHT and capital gains tax (CGT)
But I’d never really sat down to think about how all these rules and exemptions might interact in… creative ways.
So today I’ll share a few thoughts, opportunities, and useful discoveries.
As ever, I’m writing about these inheritance tax hacks partly in the hope that even more interesting wrinkles will surface with your comments.
Don’t be shy if you know something we could all benefit from.
Keeping it in the family
This post is something of a sequel to the adventures of Sarah and Stephen in the mysterious realm of pension pots and inheritance tax.
Because today we turn our attention to Sarah’s parents: Mike and Mary.
After a few light edits to their circumstances – artistic licence, your Honour – this aging couple provide the perfect case study for some inheritance tax mischief.
For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to assume that Mike and Mary are in their 80s.
There’s a fair bit of uncertainty around whether either of them will live another seven years – the magic number for IHT gifts to fully escape the clutches of HMRC.
Mary is younger, and in better health. She is still able to complete a full Waitrose shop without a lie-down in the car park.
Mike… not so much. Let’s just say he’s the likelier candidate for an ‘estate-triggering event’.
We’ll also assume that, once pensions are dragged into the IHT net from 2027, their combined assets are comfortably north of £2.35 million. This means they won’t benefit from the residence nil-rate band, which starts tapering away at £2 million and disappears entirely at £2.35 million.
We’re also going to steer clear of business reliefs and agricultural land. I’m already going stir up enough vitriol as it is!
Get professional advice: Tax law is famously voluminous and everyone’s circumstances are different. These ideas are just to get you thinking. They may not work for you. Pay for the advice of specialists as and when you need it.
Potentially Exempt Transfers
You probably know the drill: if you give something away and go on to live for seven years, there’s no IHT to pay.
Hence ‘potentially’ exempt.
If you die sooner, the gift may still be exempt if it falls within your nil-rate band (£325,000). Or it may be subject to tapered IHT if you make it past the three-year mark.
Here’s the detail that gets interesting: There are no tax consequences for gifts between spouses. So in a married couple, who gives the gift actually matters.
Let’s say Mike and Mary want to give £1m to their daughter, Sarah. Most of that money is technically Mike’s. He could just write the cheque. But Mike is older, male, and has a bunch of ailments that mean he’s statistically less likely to make it seven years than Mary is.
So instead, Mike gives £325,000 to Sarah (within his nil-rate band), and the remaining £675,000 to Mary – his spouse. No IHT or CGT involved there. (Okay, technically, he can give Sarah £328,000 because there’s also a £3,000 per year ‘annual allowance’ as well. Whatever.)
Then Mary gives that £675,000 to Sarah as a PET.
This way we’re only betting on Mary living seven more years, which – barring errant buses – seems significantly more likely. The £675,000 is out of the estate if she makes it. The £325,000 was already within Mike’s allowance.
Voilà! Same gift, less tax risk.
The snag? A need to have some grown-up conversations about relative life expectancy.
Capital gains tax
The PET rules are all well and good if you’re gifting cash. But if you’re handing over assets – like a second home or shares – then CGT rears its awkward head.
Let’s suppose Mary owns a London flat, worth £1.2m, which she inherited from her father in 1999 at a probate value of £200,000. She’s had it ever since, let out through an agent, and now hates everything about it except the capital gain.
Mary would love to just give the thing to Sarah. But gifting the property is a ‘deemed disposal’ for CGT purposes. So she would be liable for CGT on the full gain:
- £1.2m – £200,000 = £1m gain → CGT at 24% = £240,000
Mary finds it absolutely ridiculous that she’d have to pay nearly quarter of a million of CGT to give a pokey little flat that was her dad’s to her daughter. But here we are.
She could sell it first, pay the CGT, then gift the proceeds. But that’s still £240,000 in tax.
Worse, if she gives it to Sarah and then dies shortly afterwards, Sarah is whacked with a 40% IHT charge on the whole property, too. That’s another £480,000. Total tax: £720,000 on a £1.2m asset – a 60% effective rate. Ouch!
Now here’s the thing. If Mary simply leaves the property in her estate, CGT is wiped at death. IHT will still apply, but CGT won’t.
That’s arguably better. But of course, you can’t sell a house to pay care home fees if you’re dead.
(There are occasionally rumours that the current government might change this to make both CGT and IHT payable on death – because they consider dying to be a naughty way of avoiding CGT).
The spousal CGT reset trick
Here’s a clever one I hadn’t clocked until recently.
Say Mike is likely to predecease Mary (because… well, let’s just say he’s not outliving anyone at this point).
Mary could gift the house to Mike – as a spousal gift, so no CGT arises. Mike then holds the asset, with the original £200,000 base cost.
Then Mike dies, leaving the house to Mary in his will. Again, no IHT because it’s spouse-to-spouse.
But here’s the trick: Mary’s CGT base now resets to the probate value on Mike’s death – let’s say £1.2m.
Mary can now sell the house immediately for £1.2m. No CGT, no IHT, full liquidity.
She can then PET the £1.2m cash to Sarah and, if she lives another seven years, the entire value is out of the estate. And all tax-free.
That’s £720,000 in potential tax saved, simply by playing a bit of last-minute spousal ping-pong with the property title.
Morbid? A little.
Effective? Very.
Regular gifts from surplus income
This is the closest we get to an IHT cheat code.
If you make regular gifts from your surplus income, and it doesn’t impact your standard of living, those gifts are completely exempt from IHT – immediately. No need to survive seven years.
There are three tests:
- The gifts must be part of your normal expenditure
- They must be made out of income (not capital)
- You must have enough income left to maintain your standard of living
Let’s take Mike. He has a £100,000 pension income – split roughly half from a DB scheme and half from SIPP drawdown. Post-tax, he nets about £70,000. His ISA is worth £1m and yields 2%, so that’s another £20,000 of untaxed income.
Total income: £90,000 post-tax.
Mike spends around £50,000 a year. So that’s £40,000 surplus. He could reasonably start a standing order to Sarah for, say, £2,500 per month – £30,000 per year – and claim that it’s regular expenditure out of surplus income.
Provided it’s well-documented, that’s fully exempt.
But what if Mike wants to ramp it up?
Well, Mike could reallocate his ISA into higher-yielding assets. For instance, the iShares GBP Ultrashort Bond UCITS ETF (ticker: ERNS) yields around 5%, which would give £50,000 of income on a £1m ISA.
Now he’s looking at £120,000 post-tax income, £50,000 expenses – so £70,000 surplus.
Maybe bump Sarah’s monthly gift up to £5,000?
Or if he gets adventurous – say, loading the ISA with infrastructure trusts yielding 10% – that’s £100,000 income from the ISA. Add in the £70,000 pension income, and we’re now at £170,000 total income with £120,000 ‘surplus’.
£10,000 a month to Sarah? Quite possibly justifiable.
Or how about this?
What if Mike allocates all £1m in his ISA to the IncomeShares Coinbase (COIN) Options ETP?
It’s quite likely that the vast majority of Mike’s million pounds will then be thrown off as income in the next 12 months (along with, in all likelihood, a 100% capital loss). He could be giving Sarah £100,000 a month of surplus ‘income’.
I couldn’t possibly comment on either the merits of such an investment, or whether HMRC might take the line that this is a blatant attempt to artificially turn capital into income. You’ve been warned!
Again, seek professional advice. (And remember that tax planning mistakes can be ruinous.)
Executors versus beneficiaries
A quick but vital point: executors are on the hook for sorting out the estate, filing the tax forms, and paying any IHT before distributing assets.
They’re personally liable for underpaid tax if HMRC comes knocking after the estate is distributed – and they can’t recover the shortfall from the beneficiaries.
If Mike names his cautious solicitor as executor, and said solicitor is asked to sign-off on the £1m ‘normal expenditure out of surplus income’ claim above… well, you can guess how that goes. The claim doesn’t get made, and the tax gets paid.
But what if Sarah is both executor and sole beneficiary? She ticks the box – believing in good faith that her dad thought call-over-write ETFs on super volatile stocks were an excellent investment – makes the claim, and takes her chances.
Worst case, HMRC disagrees later and she pays. But she’s kept control of the process and potentially saved six-figures in IHT.
If your executors are the same people who are inheriting, then they have the same incentives.
Before we leave ISAs behind
Another quick couple of reminders on ISAs:
- ISAs are inheritable by your spouse, and they can keep the tax wrapper intact. Technically they get a one-off ‘additional permitted subscription’ (APS) allowance equal to the value of your ISA when you die, allowing them to reconstitute it in their name. I hear that the APS process is far less bureaucratic if you and your spouse use the same platform for your ISAs. Worth aligning now to avoid form-filling grief later.
- The ISA wrapper doesn’t die when you do — not straight away, at least. It hangs around as a so-called continuing ISA for up to three years or until the assets are distributed, whichever comes first. During that time, all income and capital gains remain tax-free. So if you inherit £1m of ISA investments, pulling the assets out immediately could expose you to income tax and CGT. But leave them in the wrapper and they can quietly grow, untaxed. The trick is this only really works if the estate stays in administration — something far easier to arrange if you’re both the executor and the sole beneficiary. (Another tick in the ‘advantages of being an only child’ column.) Say the portfolio returns 15% over that period, and your marginal tax rate is 40% — that’s £60,000 of tax you’ve sidestepped. Not bad for doing nothing, slowly.
Final thoughts
That’s probably enough for one post – and we haven’t even got into the complicated stuff like trusts. Let’s save that for another day.
If you’ve got other strategies, horror stories, or offbeat ideas, please do drop them in the comments.
Again – as always this is not personal advice. It’s not even pseudo-advice! I’m just a bloke on the internet.
For further reading, I highly recommend Your Last Gift: Getting Your Affairs in Order by Matthew Hudson. It’s a surprisingly readable guide to getting your financial afterlife in shape.
Maybe give a copy to your parents? At a tactful moment.
Follow Finumus on Bluesky (not that he ever posts there) or X. Also read his other articles for Monevator.
During the previous Trump term, the first thing I did every morning was look at the news on my phone – just to check he hadn’t blown anything up.
I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t do that again through Trump Part II.
Well, that’s over, as is much of what we’ve taken for granted about the US-led international order that’s underpinned Western prosperity since World War 2.
Partisan bias causes people to be more negative about the economy whenever their ‘side’ is out of power. But at least in the past I always believed that any US President had a vested interest in the common good. There was always a hope their policy medicine could work, even if I believed it to be harsh, or likely to cause bad side-effects.
Sadly, Trump’s medicine is all side-effects and no therapeutic value. It’s the hydroxychloroquine of economics.
And this time, there’s nobody in Trump’s administration to tell him it’s a lose-lose idea. Or to at least distract him with some less important toy to break.
Trump tariffs tantrum
The market’s verdict is clear. Here’s the stock market slide as represented by various ETFs, with Trump’s Ruination Day tariffs listed per country (black text on each bar):
Equity ETF returns per country from 2 April to 4 April 2025. Source: JustETF. Not shown: 41% tariffs on the Falkland Islands, 0% on Russia, 50% on mighty Lesotho, 10% on Penguin Island.1 10% on British Indian Ocean Territory – inhabited by US and UK military personnel only.
Two things stand out, aside from it being a global bin fire.
Firstly, the US market is one of the worst affected.
Secondly, at the time of writing there’s little correlation between the size of Trump’s tariff and the impact on individual country stocks.2
For instance, the Australian market is down over 10% after a 10% tariff slap. Yet Vietnamese firms ‘only’ dropped 5.8%, despite Vietnam’s 46% tariff clothesline.
Meanwhile the UK’s FTSE All-Share lost 6.3% – even though we supposedly got off lightly.
Tis but a flesh wound
Nobody knows if Trump will walk some of this back or escalate. His advisors don’t know. He probably doesn’t know himself.
More to the point, nobody can predict how business and consumer confidence will bear up against the turmoil and anxiety. But it’s hardly the time to splash out is it?
Perhaps deleting all our news and stock market apps is the way to go – because here’s one way to view the decline:
A 4.6% loss since the start of January this year only sets the Slow & Steady portfolio back to July 2024. That doesn’t even rank among the top five worst quarterly losses in our model portfolio’s short life.
The portfolio’s worst drawdown was -14.9% in 2022. And we haven’t actually experienced a proper bear market loss since gunning up the portfolio more than 14 years ago.
That’s a blessing! But it also means that many of us haven’t been truly tested yet.
Risk matters
William Bernstein advises investors to use their first bear market as a reality check – a verification of your actual risk tolerance.
If you panicked last time, then Bernstein thinks you should ease back on equities and beef up your bonds so you’ll find it easier to handle the next go around.
But what happens if you haven’t previously experienced a bear market for equities – but you did recently suffer a hideous bond shock?
My guess is that some of us are in over our heads on the equities side, having grown leery of bonds. Perhaps we’re relying on diamond hands that could to turn to jelly in a real rout.
That happened last time during the Covid crash. Some of the Monevator community fled the field.
Granted, the market in March 2020 was going down like a lift with its cable cut. Yet equities bounced back within five weeks.
That was then…
If you’re feeling a grim sense of foreboding then I’m right there with you. But if you’re feeling scared or downright sick at the thought of what could happen next then you’ve got a couple of viable choices.
You could pare back a little on risk. Swap, say, 10-20% of your equities for bonds and/or cash.
Things could easily get even worse from here – though nobody knows for sure – so perhaps take a hit now to stave off being completely broken later.
Alternatively, brace yourself and hold on for dear life.
There should be a stock market pain simulator out there but this chart is the best I can do:
Bull and bear markets over time (US). Source: Vanguard
Take a long look at those negative numbers, and at how many years you might have to wait to turn the corner. Can you live with that?
If you can, then you should eventually be rewarded with one of the successive growth eruptions that dominate the chart.
Maybe sooner. Maybe later. Who knows where this goes next? The adults are not in the Situation Room.
But some day they will be again.
So if you’re not ready to bail, if you’re in it to win it, then you’re gonna have to take some pain. Grit your teeth, pull down your tin hat, and pledge that you won’t sell.
Here’s a fortifying tweet – quoting Barry Ritholtz’ new book – that might help:
There’s never any 100% guarantees. But history is on the side of investors who’ve held fast for the long-term.
How’s the Slow & Steady doing?
Everything is down in our model portfolio for the quarter, except for bonds. At least something is still working!
Here are the latest numbers (as of 4 April – a long time ago):
The Slow & Steady is Monevator’s model passive investing portfolio. It was set up at the start of 2011 with £3,000. An extra £1,310 is invested every quarter into a diversified set of index funds, tilted towards equities. You can read the origin story and find all the previous passive portfolio posts in the Monevator vaults. Last quarter’s instalment can be found here.
New transactions
Every quarter we throw £1,310 of red meat at the wild dogs of the market. Our stake is split between our portfolio’s seven funds, according to our predetermined asset allocation.
We rebalance using Larry Swedroe’s 5/25 rule. That hasn’t been activated this quarter, so the trades play out as follows:
Emerging market equities
iShares Emerging Markets Equity Index Fund D – OCF 0.2%
Fund identifier: GB00B84DY642
New purchase: £104.80
Buy 53.571 units @ £1.96
Target allocation: 8%
Global property
iShares Environment & Low Carbon Tilt Real Estate Index Fund – OCF 0.17%
Fund identifier: GB00B5BFJG71
New purchase: £65.50
Buy 29.39 units @ £2.23
Target allocation: 5%
Developed world ex-UK equities
Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-UK Equity Index Fund – OCF 0.14%
Fund identifier: GB00B59G4Q73
New purchase: £484.70
Buy 0.752 units @ £644.76
Target allocation: 37%
UK equity
Vanguard FTSE UK All-Share Index Trust – OCF 0.06%
Fund identifier: GB00B3X7QG63
New purchase: £65.50
Buy 0.242 units @ £271.17
Target allocation: 5%
Global small cap equities
Vanguard Global Small-Cap Index Fund – OCF 0.29%
Fund identifier: IE00B3X1NT05
New purchase: £65.50
Buy 0.170 units @ £384.75
Target allocation: 5%
UK gilts
Vanguard UK Government Bond Index – OCF 0.12%
Fund identifier: IE00B1S75374
New purchase: £301.30
Buy 2.253 units @ £133.75
Target allocation: 23%
Royal London Short Duration Global Index-Linked Fund – OCF 0.27%
Fund identifier: GB00BD050F05
New purchase: £222.70
Buy 204.688 units @ £1.09
Target allocation: 17%
New investment contribution = £1,310
Trading cost = £0
Average portfolio OCF = 0.17%
User manual
Take a look at our broker comparison table for your best investment account options.
InvestEngine is currently cheapest if you’re happy to invest only in ETFs. Or learn more about choosing the cheapest stocks and shares ISA for your situation.
If this seems too complicated, check out our best multi-asset fund picks. These include all-in-one diversified portfolios such as the Vanguard LifeStrategy funds.
Interested in monitoring your own portfolio or using the Slow & Steady spreadsheet for yourself? Our piece on portfolio tracking shows you how.
You might also enjoy a refresher on why we think most people are best choosing passive vs active investing.
Take it steady,
The Accumulator