This section is for the money you won’t need soon, and for the safety nets that stop a bad year from reaching it. It has two halves.
Investing & Wealth Building covers the investing itself: how ETFs work, how to build a simple portfolio, what fees and tax take out along the way, and the decisions people agonise over, such as whether to wait for a better moment. It’s also where our own counting lives. We marked the settled calls from a run of Reuters’ polls of Europe’s equity strategists against where the index actually closed, and went through eighteen years of European tracker-fund history, in 107,454 overlapping windows, to see how often waiting paid. It won roughly three times in ten.
Financial Protection covers what catches you when something goes wrong. That means sick pay, unemployment benefit and redundancy, pensions and how long they have to last, the insurance worth having, the cash you can reach quickly, and how to tell an investment from a scam.
Everything here is general information about how the rules and the numbers work, not advice on what you should buy. Investments can fall as well as rise, and past returns don’t promise future ones.
