For a moment there I got excited. I blame Peter Hood, who dangled the capital gains avoidance carrot dangerously close. Peter’s theory is elegant: Use your capital gains allowance each year to offload your cheap ETF units at a profit and then buy them back at a higher price. Your cost per unit goes up ...

We received an excellent email from Jason Herron, who has found a way to make Discovery Vitality work hard for him. I have a little love affair for Discovery miles and thought now that you are using Vitality, it could be useful to you and the listeners. There is a bit of admin in getting the ...

There’s nothing Wolf of Wall Street about long-term wealth creation, especially for us index investors. You diligently put away what you can and wait for the market to do its thing. If you’re not fond of watching paint dry, you probably won’t get your kicks from this investment strategy. It’s not surprising, therefore, than we ...

Happy New Year! We hope to make this your (and our) most successful financial year ever. Sticking to the theme, we talk about our financial resolutions for 2018. Last year I made the same financial mistake twice. In trying to avoid cost, I incurred unnecessary cost and aggravating effort. This year, I hope to develop ...

The Fat Wallet Show While every question we receive on this podcast pertains to a completely unique financial situation, some themes recur. More often than not, the questions we receive pertain to property investments, tax efficiency and foreign investing. In this mini podcast, Simon and I discuss the answers we give most often to these ...

It’s safe to say that I think about money slightly more than the average person. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. Weirdly, though, my financial hyper-vigilance sometimes results in exactly what I try to avoid. 2017 felt the need to teach me that lesson more than once. In the second of our mini podcasts, ...

Fat Wallet listener Hugo Schuitemaker and his trusty Excel spreadsheet made a startling discovery. An amount invested at the beginning of the year would have to earn a 19.5% return to catch up to a 10% discount on his child’s school fees. Six mini episodes to wrap up the recording year. Pink bubbles to get ...

This week, two listeners help Simon score free wine and free petrol using loyalty programmes. Here’s a new Fat Wallet rule: if it gets us free wine, you are automatically the win of the week. No questions asked. Scenes from last week’s double episode recording. He seems perplexed, but it’s because we just spent an ...

How it happened that November turned into the retirement annuity month, I’m not sure. Following our previous two episodes, we were bombarded by questions and concerns around RAs. It seems our episode on choosing an RA spurred many of you into action. We hear from an 86-year-old listener how far the 15% savings rate actually ...