> Do you have any recommendations for providers (beyond the list you gave)?

I use TD Direct Investing as my broker for both a non-ISA shares account, and an ISA account which is mostly shares rather than funds. I also use Sippdeal (AJ Bell) for my SIPP which does the same sort of thing (except I happen to be using their pension wrapper rather than an ISA wrapper) with a different fee structure.

If I was starting out today with an ISA I might use Charles Stanley Direct who have a reasonable price for holding a mixture of funds and shares, until you have about £20k, when some other options might be cheaper (their annual fee is a (low) percentage of your total assets but obviously costs more the more you have). Look for percentage fees if you only have (relatively) few assets and fixed fees if you have lots of assets.

If all I was doing was buying shares and not funds, and I only wanted UK shares (like RM etc), the cheapest option in or outside an ISA wrapper is probably x-o.co.uk, an execution-only no frills broker. But as a newbie you should not be buying shares in individual companies that you really know relatively nothing about (see comment below).

There is a decent comparison of costs of different brokers at http://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/ ; Monevator is a good site overall and although it caters a bit more to the 'passive' investor rather than someone who trades shares or buys actively managed funds, due to the personal philosophy of those that run the site, the people writing there are pretty smart. Lots to keep you reading.

>I absolutely wouldn't sell then rebuy Royal Mail to move them into an ISA, I agree. Where do you think the Royal Mail stock is going to settle?

Exactly, if you had £1000 cash you would not buy RM shares now they have just spiked up 33+%. This tells you that if you have £1000 of RM shares you should not keep them. Where it settles is not relevant, you have just got gifted a free chunk of cash and that same day-one free gain is no longer available. If you want to gamble on it going up or down from here, you can, but you don't know what the odds are. So it is a game that mathematically you shouldn't bother playing. Sell the shares.

>Going forward I think I'd like to have about a 70/30 split between funds and shares picked myself (to practice investing, or something like that).

>Is this the right approach? I am trying to get into investing, and intend to put more money into it over the next few years. In your opinion, should I be focusing on funds and not holding some individual stocks myself?

Yes to the focusing on funds. A fund is a way of deploying £1000 into 100 companies across multiple geographic markets without getting out of bed and buying £10 worth of each of the 100 companies and paying £10 broker fees to buy each of them and £10 to later sell each of them, requiring each company to triple in value for you to even break even. Why would you want to access multiple companies? Diversification - you don't know which company will perform well or go bust. Why would you want to access multiple markets (USA, UK, Korea, China, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Brazil)? Diversification, you don't know which country will perfom well or badly compared to your own.

There are different choices in funds with different exposures to different types of companies around the world. There are different strategies - if you buy a UK index fund you effectively put most of your cash in the largest UK companies so that when it says on the news that 'the FTSE 100 went up by 4% last month', your portfolio also went up by 4% because you have 70 quid of your thousand quid in each of HSBC and Royal Dutch Shell oil, and 2 quid in each of William Hill and Tate & Lyle, so your proportions mirror the index and overall your portfolio will move like 'the market'. Whether it is sensible to have over 30x the exposure to oil companies like Shell and BP than you have to sugar and milk companies like Tate or Dairy Crest, is another question entirely. But it is one option. Otherwise you can have an investment trust or a more 'actively managed' fund, where the management fees are higher but someone is making decisions to pursue a particular strategy to try to beat the market.

Reddit loves passive investing using indexes because it is easy and for Americans it can be tax efficient compared to active managers buying and selling underlying companies all the time. On the main /r/PersonalFinance forum they would tell you to just buy Vanguard index funds (extremely low fees, basic index tracking). Vanguard have a product called 'Lifestrategy' funds which you can get in the UK through the brokers I mentioned above. It is one fund which is a mix of different international indexes so you are not just following UK (your local index) or US (the biggest international one, half the investible world). Blackrock do a similar fund family called 'Consensus'.

The best thing you can do starting out with 3k in your ISA and wanting to get into investing, is spend a couple of percent of it on some books. Sure, best way to learn is by mistakes so you could buy some individual stocks. If they go up you will think it is easy and will learn nothing. If they go down it is an expensive lesson. So go with books.

Standard book recommendation for a UK newbie is Tim Hale's Smarter Investing ;new edition out this month, old edition now half price on Kindle.

I have that book, he is a huge fan of index investing / passive investing which as mentioned is only one way of doing it. But it's standard issue for a new investor.

A more balanced approach might be in Andy Bell's new book DIY investor, he owns AJBell which runs Sippdeal, Money AM, Shares mag, and diyinvestor.co.uk. Preview here . I haven't read it but the guy seems smart enough and the preview looks like what you want (i saw a promo link because as mentioned, I use SIPPdeal as one of my brokers/platforms). If you can sell your RM shares at a nice price, you might have enough for a couple of books and £250 free profit.

Hope that helps get you started, enjoy. Just don't count on next £250 being as easy as the last ;-)

[Obligatory "Edit: Thanks for the gold !!!1!!one!!!" ]

Homework can be found in the "Recommended Reading" section of our FAQ. I've pasted it at the end of this comment for your convenience.

If there was one book most worth reading I would argue it's Smarter Investing by Tim Hale. It gives you all the basic grounding that you need to know in an easy-to-digest manner.

Another good source for information is www.monevator.com, though the writers are very opinionated and not great fans of people in my profession.

You could potentially seek financial advice, and pay a fixed fee for some recommendations, or even pay Hargreaves Lansdown directly for advice (they offer telephone-based advice for a fee), but at your level of savings the costs may be disproportionally high.

Recommended Reading

Books about investing

Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

This book was written by the father of "value investing", and the mentor of Warren Buffett, who is widely accepted to be the world's most successful investor.

It was originally published in 1948, but Ben Graham updated it periodically over the years, and it stands as true today as it ever has.

Beating the Street - Peter Lynch

Published in 1994, this is arguably showing its age more than Intelligent Investor. Either way, valuable reading from one of the best managers of money in the past few decades.

Naked Trader - Robbie Burns

Subtitled "How anyone can make money trading shares", this is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek account of one financial journalist's attempt to quit his job and make £1,000,000 using a short-to-medium term trading strategy. Not very scientific, but an interesting counterpoint to the previous recommendations.

Smarter Investing - Tim Hale

The ultimate counterpoint to attempting to "beat the markets" - after spending 15 years working in active fund manager, Tim Hale concluded that the best outcomes for most investors in most situations would be a simple portfolio of "passive" investments (that is, funds which attempt to track a market, rather than outperform it). This style is favoured by the likes of Monevator, and many of the subscribers here.

Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder letters - Warren Buffett

Not a book, but a series of essays over the years from the world's most successful investor. Makes interesting reading! Notably, the 2014 letter (not published in the above link but published here in abridged form) implies that he now feels most investors would be best served by low-cost trackers.

The Financial Times guide to investing - Glen Arnold

A great starter guide, going from the very basics (why businesses need shareholders) to more in-depth explanations of different types of investment, and step-by-step guides on how to execute trades.

I'm a little tired and should probably answer this tomorrow - I might make another reply in the morning, but I'll put down what I can now.

You're right, but… everything depends on factors which, to present-day you, are uncertain.

I think it's quite common to talk in terms of "I'll live off the interest" - I have certainly done so before I learned more about this stuff. But unlike interest, investment returns are not a fixed rate.

If you were to receive a safe, fixed-rate of interest from your investment then you could calculate the amount you could draw off each year into the future and keep your lump sum the same. I think thats a comforting idea, because keeping your lump sum intact means you can keep living of the interest forever, and that gives us a feeling of security.

However, that would be inefficient, anyway, because it would means that your lump sum would be intact when you die, and you'd end up leaving it to your kids or favourite charity. That's a nice idea, but it would mean that you're sacrificing £1000's a year in income, which you could be withdrawing from your lump sum, as you approach death - you should be spending that money on yourself.

Secondly, you don't know what your investment returns will be. We have accurate historical stockmarket data since, I think, about 1900. If I recollect, the average return on equities over that period is about 7%, and the average inflation about 3%, leaving about 4% for you. However, that period includes a couple of really profitable periods for investors in the second half of the 20th century, and the really stagnant first half, which included the Great Depression.

The only certainty in investing is that if you keep money in cash under your bed, then its value will be eroded with inflation. Governments insure bank accounts (upto $250,000 in the US or c £80,000 in the UK) because they want to promote saving and consumer confidence in the economy. Everything else is speculation, and hence your returns reflect risk and volatility.

If your mate asked you to lend him £100, and that he'd pay you back £8.50 a month over 12 months, you'd be running a loss compared to the 3% interest that a bank would pay you. Worse, if your mate loses his job, or you argue with him over something unrelated and he decides that you don't deserve your money back, then you've lost a lot more money. So if you agree to lend him the money if he pays you back £10 a month (£120 in total), that 20% APR is compensation for the risk you're taking.

If we could all earn the best rates by sticking our money in something safe like a bank, we'd all be doing it - the best rates are earned by investing in a diversified stockmarket fund (probably an index fund), which is more volatile. If you're investing in an index fund, you own shares in factories, supermarkets, logistics networks and intellectual property - most of those companies are probably still going to be selling chewing gum and making tractors in a few decades' time, and the few that go bankrupt will be compensated for by the growth of the remaining companies.

We can't know if the next 30 years will be as profitable for investors as the 1980's or as bad as the 1930's - all we know is that, on average, stockmarket indexes have in the past exceeded all other consumer investments. I believe there has been no period of more than 35 years, since 1900, in which the stock market has not made net gains.

Most 10, 15 and 20 year periods throughout history have seen the stockmarket do very well, but there have been some 10 and 20 year periods in which it has lost in value. Historically, over periods in excess of 20 years, stockmarket investors are more likely to have doubled their investment, but there is still a chance of a loss. (Should be a small chance of a small loss.)

We don't know the future, but we do have some aggregate stats. The safe withdrawal rate must take account of the worst case scenario (otherwise you'll run out of money), but with longer investing horizons you're also more likely to ride out the bad patches (and enjoy record returns). That's why the drawdown rate flattens on longer retirement periods.

The safe withdrawal rate is inherently pessimistic, but it's still better than what you'd get from totally safe returns (in the bank, for example) and not drawing from your lump sum. That would give you really mediocre returns. Even a 1% or 2% risk of failure will get you considerably higher returns in the worst case (I think), and an order of magnitude higher in the best case.

I've rambled on longer than I intended, but I hope this is helpful. Read Tim Hale's Smarter Investing, because he explains it much better than I can. I'm only an amateur, but I think and worry about the safe withdrawal rate a lot.

If you allow for a pessimistic safe withdrawal rate you'll probably have a very comfortable retirement.

Ok, that's basically what I did when I started out. Let me just say, there is a learning curve- and LOTS to learn. However, if investing turns out to be something you enjoy, and you always continue learning, you open the door to higher returns in general (and a very interesting hobby :D ).

At the start, you don't need to know much more than the general facts. Equity, bonds, the market. What the lingo means, and where the resources are. The original book I got for an overview was the following, and I would recommend it: The
The FT Investing Guide - not a cheap book, but will go over the foundational knowledge you need.

I would then follow with The Intelligent Investor, which is THE great value-investment book. It will tell you about how to logically approach investing in companies, and give you a framework for choosing better companies to invest in, and not overpaying for the equity you invest in.

Knowledge of macro economics is also a plus, imo. I started off by reading Economics for Dummies (yes, really).

The basics of accounting is somewhat essential, but it's covered in the FT guide. If you can get to the point where you can understand a typical income statement, balance sheet or statement of cash flows, it should be enough to be a competent investor. It allows you to understand the underlying financial health of a business, which is very important.

Your aim is to find strong companies, with good future prospects, which are undervalued by the market, and invest for the long-term. This will allow you to maximise your returns.

..I was all set to continue writing this wall of text, but I think I'll leave it here for now. If you have any further questions, or would like more clarification on any points, I'd be happy to help. So just let me know.

I would agree with the other posters that for an 18 year+ timescale, you should be looking at an equity based investment rather than cash. You should concentrate on minimising the fees involved in whatever product you choose - so some kind of passive index tracker is ideal.

My personal recommendation would be the Vanguard LifeStrategy funds :

http://monevator.com/using-vanguard-lifestrategy-funds-life/

You next need to decide what wrapper/platform you're going to use to invest in the fund. You could do this with a junior ISA in your childs name, but I believe this means that it will be under their control from the moment they turn 18. What I've chosen to do for my kids is invest the money I'm saving for them in my own ISA so that I can have some control over when and for what purpose the money is used for (I seem to recall I wasn't at my decision making best at 18....)

Since you say you don't have much experience with investing generally, can I recommend picking up the following book which I think gives a really good overview of how to invest cheaply and effectively :

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-Simpler-Decisions-Financial/dp/0273785370?ie=UTF8&qid=1469529696&ref_=la_B001HCV9SM_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

(surprised by how expensive it seems to be actually - maybe try shopping around? Really worthwhile book though I promise..) There's also a lot of good information on the web - I'd recommend the monevator blog i linked to above as a good starting point.

I have no connection to either the monevator blog or Tim Hale - but I've found them both very useful personally.

> Do you reckon in my case, I should continue to maximise the H2B then transfer at year end to my LISA, or open a S&S ISA now, and open a LISA next tax year?

If you haven't already, I'd strongly recommend reading the MSE guide for LISA and H2B ISA's; MSE Lifetime ISA Guide

Short Answer; Keep contributing to your H2B ISA, then transfer it across to a S/S LISA if you're comfortable with that before April 2018 to maximise your allowance and bonus you'll get.

Long Answer; speaking from my own experience and plans with my H2B and LISA, I currently have been contributing to a H2B since they were originally offered. I will continue to contribute to my H2B till early 2018 (around Feb) then I will transfer it to the S/S LISA I opened with Hargreaves for £100 back in June - The reason for opening it with just £100 is that your LISA must be open for 12 months before you can withdraw from it to buy a house. While we aren't actively looking right now for a house (and if seems like you aren't looking right now either) anything could happen.

The reason I've kept my money with the H2B and not moved it all over to the LISA already is that (and ignore that it's a S/S LISA) the interest I'm getting in the H2B is too good to miss up right now.

After my January 2018 payment into my H2B I'll have contributed £2,000 into it for this tax year. I'll transfer it to my LISA, which I have already started with £100 this tax year, allowing me to contribute the final amount of £1,900 as a lump sum. That means by April 2018 I'll have maximised my LISA allowance of £4,000. I'll also have transferred across my previous H2B contributions of around £4,200.

The 25% bonus is then paid on the whole lot after the end of the 17/18 Tax year, whereas had the cash been left in the H2B I would have to wait till I exchange on the house to see any of that bonus.

It's important to note that anything transferred from H2B to LISA after the end of this tax year will not benefit from the immediate bonus.

Your other points about moving from the Premium Bonds to a S/S ISA. I feel you'd be best served by spending some time reading up on funds available to you and what your goals are. Tim Hale's Smarting Investing is probably the best £15 you'll spend to give you an insight to the world of Stocks and Shares and should be your first port of call. Time Hale - Smarter Investing

Have you bought and read Tim Hale's Smarter Investing first? If not, go and buy it! It's only £20 but it'll net you thousands of pounds in the long run. It's targeted at UK readers and outlines the steps needed to start investing in index funds. More than anything, it will empower you to make your own financial decisions instead of letting other people guide you what to do with your money.

One key point that I'll outline now is that your desire to have your investments be relatively liquid is not really compatible with investing in stocks. The reason for that is stocks are volatile and it's possible you could lose half of your investment overnight in a market crash. The probability of that gets smaller as you leave your money invested for longer, which is why people usually recommend a minimum of 5 years to invest your money, although 10+ years is ideal. Anything less than 5 years and your best bet is keeping your money as cash and spreading it around high-interest accounts (see https://www.bankaccountsavings.co.uk/ for the best accounts).

Once you've read Smarter Investing, you may be interested in investing in a global equity tracker. There are various effort-free options where you fund and forget, such as Vanguard's Lifestrategy series or the FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund.

Alternatively if you're feeling braver, you could check out my guide on constructing your own global equity tracker here.

But above all, read Smarter Investing!

Repeating /u/jrharte:
>Read this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-Simpler-Decisions-Financial/dp/0273785370/

>Follow this: https://i.imgur.com/ezGWhE3.png

One of the lessons in the book is that the aim of the game in investing is not to gain the most tokens but to ensure you loose the fewest. This means minimising your costs, especially when you're at the beginning of your investing journey. The miracle of compound interest means that every £1 you save now will be worth many more £ in 10-20 years.

Another element to consider is how good are you at picking winners? Do you think you can pick shares which will consistently beat the market? How about funds? Can you pick the best fund manager who puts together a market beating basket of investments year after year after year?

I'd wager that you'd be honest with yourself and say probably not. So what are the chances of you picking a market beating financial advisor?

Please do not do BTL. Far richer people and more savvy investors have done BTL and lost money.

You have a wonderful gift. £170K is an amazing windfall for you and your partner. Do not throw it away on a speculative investment, one that you do not know anything about -- can you tell me, in quantitative terms, how the housing market is doing, what are your rental yields (gross and net)? If you cannot, do not enter the BTL market as an investment.

My suggestion to you is to look to buying a flat for yourselves to stay in, and take the remaining funds and fill up your ISAs each year. Within your ISAs, you can invest in low cost tracker Index Funds. If this concept is alien to you, now is a good time to read up about this! A simple beginner book is [The Intelligent Investor] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661) by Benjamin Graham.

Alternatively, look at [Nutmeg] (https://www.nutmeg.com). This is a simple platform that you can put your money into ISAs.

To put into simple terms about what your £170K can bring you:

1. You buy a small flat for £70K. You don't have to pay rent again.
   
   
2. You put the remaining £100k into ISAs. Fill you and your partner's ISA up to the maximum of £20K per person each year. From your original Capital of £100K in investments index funds, you safely withdraw ~4% each year without touching the capital. This means, you can get £4000 each year RIGHT NOW without doing anything, for the rest of your life, like a permanent pension. OR, if you choose not to withdraw your money RIGHT NOW, you can GROW your capital for the future.
   
   I am not your financial advisor! But please read and think carefully about your next steps. You have been handed an opportunity of a lifetime.
   

Have a look at the flowchart.

As said by /u/GordonCopestake, your goals should not be a reaction to the money. If you don't have any concrete goals yet, now is a good time to think about them. However, do so pretending you don't have that £20k.

A couple of options to think about:

1. Put the money away as savings in some current account(s) until you have decided what your goals are. It's probably a good thing to start with regardless, as it makes managing the money easier. Look at this website to see how to best manage the £20k. If you want to keep things simple: open a Santander 123 and put it all in there.
   
   
2. If you're looking at property soon, a LISA might be good for you. You should first complete option 1, and then work out how much you want to move to your LISA every year afterwards.
   
   
3. Don't have any plans for the next 5 years (at least)? Maybe investing is an option then. This book is frequently recommended to read up on investing and what to look out for.
   
   Whatever route you take, I believe option 1 is usually a relevant starting point, so I would advise you look into that first. It keeps your newfound savings split from your checking account, and helps you keep a good overview of your money.
   
   Good luck.

For my S&S ISA I put everything into this, you could save a bit of money and get HSBC FTSE All-World Index Fund C as it's essentially the same but with slightly less on-going charges.

I'd say I was on the upper end of risk tolerance though especially for medium term savings.

As for books I think this is the most recommended book on this subreddit for a very good reason.

It should be enough to teach you the power and benefit of investing in passive trackers vs trying to play the market via expensive active fund managers.

Plus there's a few other nuggets of valuable information tucked away in there!

Read this book

The best option is a stock/bond portfolio as described in the book. The best fund for stocks IMO is the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap accumulation fund which didn't exist when the book was written.

What break down you get depends on your aims. 100% stocks gives the greatest average return but also the greatest volatility. This means after 10 years your expected value has a wider range of possibilities but a higher average. Adding in bonds will reduce the average but also shrink the range of possibilities giving yourself a stronger idea of what return you will get.

To pick a portfolio structure you need to know what your aims are and make a judgement on how you want to get there. You can go 100% stock and potentially get there a lot sooner or a lot later. Or you can add bond components and reduce the variability but potentially need to either invest more or wait longer. The worse case scenario for an 80/20 portfolio will be better than the worse case scenario for a 100/0 portfolio but the average scenario is better with pure stocks.

Yes. You'll be way better off. I wrote a short guide about setting up a contracting company, it sounds like it'd be quite relevant to your situation: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07NS2YNP7/

I dare say as a contracting company, you can easily make twice as much, and if you know you don't make use of the various free benefits then you're not getting the full value out of employment, plus a lot of the benefits you can provide for yourself from your own company.

Just to help you with your research as your actual question has been answered, what you're describing is called "Financial Independence", often combined with "Early Retirement" if your income grows significantly.

The relevant subs are /r/financialindependence/ (US and high-earners heavy) and /r/FIREUK/ (which has links to UK-based blogs like monevator.com). If you haven't already, you'll be recommended to read this from our wiki:

> Smarter Investing - Tim Hale
>
> The ultimate counterpoint to attempting to "beat the markets" - after spending 15 years working in active fund manager, Tim Hale concluded that the best outcomes for most investors in most situations would be a simple portfolio of "passive" investments (that is, funds which attempt to track a market, rather than outperform it). This style is favoured by the likes of Monevator, and many of the subscribers here.

Market values of shares would become dislocated from intrinsic value of shares.

This would make value investing an enticing prospect, passive investors would reach for the top shelf of their bookcase and dust off their old copy of Security Analysis by Ben Graham , and go back to work picking undervalued stocks.

It will never happen though, there will always be active investors.

I would recommend Tim Hale’s Smarter Investing (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0273785370/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile) so that you can get an idea of what asset allocation is most appropriate to your needs and what you would like your investment to do for you. I know everyone preaches to read that book but, honestly, it is the best £20 you will ever spend.

As mentioned above, past performance means absolutely nothing when looking at what may happen in the future.

Congrats! First thing to do is follow the flowchart.

If you're in a position to save then get an emergency fund going (3-6 months outgoings in a current account).

If you're a potential first time buyer then you will want to consider opening a LISA - 25% guaranteed return on up to £4K a year if you spend it on a house.

Now for longer term investments you will want to consider investing in equities (stocks and shares). Firstly, read this.

You have a few ways to invest in equities, the two best ways are a SIPP (private pension) and a stocks and shares ISA.

Given you're in the higher tax bracket you should be looking at using the tax advantages of a SIPP.

As a rule of thumb you should be putting away half your age when you start saving as a percentage into a pension for the rest of your working life. For you - 15% of your pay until you retire - minimum.

If I were in this position, I'd max out a LISA each year (assuming you are eligible), then open a SIPP and invest in a diversified index tracker with 15% of your income (add more for tax savings, a generous first year or so wouldn't hurt to make up for lost time).

Then I would consider putting the rest into a 100% equities S&S ISA.

> As I'm still pretty new to investing, I was wondering if any of you had any advice, tips, suggestions for me.

Go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/wiki/index

Then here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance/wiki/recommendedreading

Then buy this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-Simpler-Decisions-Financial/dp/0273785370/

You'll thank me in 30 years. Best return on £20 you'll ever invest.

Don't forget to keep some cash on hand because you are young and your perspective on life is probably going to change quite significantly in the new few years.

With S&S (J)ISAs what you invest in will determine your returns. If you invest in a low cost index fund on average based on historical performance you will return ~7% (though ~2% will be eaten by inflation). Whether you actually return that is down to what you invest in and the market performance over that period. With 18 years to invest you've got more than enough time to weather market dips though so personally that would be my choice.

If you're looking for an easy index fund to invest in through your JISA Vanguard's Lifestrategy funds are commonly recommended on this sub and would be a good place to start your research. These can be purchased with minimal fees directly through Vanguard.

You don't need to chop and change what you're invested in in fact that's the last thing you should do as this will incur fees which will eat into returns and you'll end up selling low and buying high. You pick a fund or mix of funds and stick with it for the term you've pre defined. Resist the urge to look at its performance more than once a year at most.

Before you get into this sort of investing you should make sure you fully understand it though. Tim Hale's book 'Smarter Investing' is a great resource. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-3rd-edn-Decisions/dp/0273785370/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

For a 5 year time frame you'd be best with a cash LISA. Skipton are going to be the first to offer it (sometime this month).

http://www.skipton.co.uk/savings/isas/lifetime-isa

For investments look at S&S ISA and/or pension. Invest your money in a global tracker.

Get this book to help you learn more / decide what's best for you: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-Simpler-Decisions-Results/dp/0273722077

First off starting with some non financial advice stuff

It seems you have things sorted from a technical ability perspective but when it comes down to requirements and understanding what is needed that is something you might fall down on.

This happens a fair bit to be honest with you as systems can get a lot more complex and you are at the mercy of any business analysis which might be done, so as you say you can deliver "it" if you know what "it" is, that comes from experience but can be learnt in other ways.

Couple of book links:

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clean-Coder-Conduct-Professional-Programmers/dp/0137081073
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pragmatic-Programmer-Andrew-Hunt/dp/020161622X/
  
  Now financial questions, I would adjust your salary expectations, but it might not be out of the question for you to find something in that area especially depending on how commutable Manchester is, but there are places everywhere which do this kind of work, just might find competition is different.

Agree - Lurk around on here and you learn a lot.
Our financial advisor that we used recently for our new mortgage also sorted out our life insurance, income insurance - didnt charge us a direct fee at all. He claims his fee via the insurance & mortgage company.

With regards to investments read -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-Simpler-Decisions-Financial/dp/0273785370/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Then you will know about platforms, which charge a lot less than your financial advisor and how to look for funds.

At £1400 - on a small investment to start with as you say - you would need to make quite a large % growth on any portfolio to make it worthwhile.

r/UKPersonalFinance seems to be some good information for free (although double check the advice).
Also look at r/UKInvesting

I totally understand this feeling too - been there!

I found the book What Colour is your Parachute really helpful for this - when you have a few ideas of things you might like to do and why but also feel like you need a life overhaul/plan.

here’s the book it’s a workbook and so takes some time, as it’ll only be useful if you do the exercises etc

I think the main PF ones will be recommended well, and lots of the same approaches apply on both sides. Tax treatment is probably the key difference, which might not be best learned through a book.

So aside I'm going to recommend one book I adore that I think is hugely applicable through life (has probably changed my view upon the world more than almost anything else) and one that I've just started but is so far fascinating.

Thinking, fast and slow: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576

Nobel prize winner, talking about how humans think weirdly. I challenge anyone to read this and not find something they think is applicable to their own life or how they view the world.

How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Be-Miserable-Strategies-Already/dp/B01HH0BC70

A guide to being miserable. A self help book effectively written from the other side. I detest saccharine self help things, this is captivating and I think a great way of viewing problems.

Not as relevant, but The Evolution of Cooperation: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Co-Operation-Penguin-Press-Science/dp/0140124950

A simple and perhaps laboured point but something that has stuck with me over the past 10 years.

Two of these, the first and last, are ones I've finished and lent out to others as much as I can possibly do so. I expect that how to be miserable will fall under these ranks but I've not finished it yet.

Essentially it comes down to how long before you might want to spend it.

If it's sometime in the next five years, then keep it in cash, because the stock market might dip and there might be less there than when you started with.

Beyond a five year horizon, the chance that the stock market has made you money becomes greater. Check out this graph for historical returns (although these don't guarantee the future will be the same). Furthermore if you diversify your portfolio, the risk of adverse real world events causing a fall in your investments is reduced. As such the standard advice is to find a low cost globally diversified passive fund or funds, the classic example of which are Vanguard's Lifestrategy funds.

The most important thing is to understand what you're getting in to, so the best advice is to do some reading. Monevator is a fantastic and accessible site, and Tim Hale's Smarter Investing book is often recommended too.

Read Tim Hale's book Smarter Investing. You don't need to play the markets or analyse companies or anything like that. It is super simple.

Tl;dr: Step 1: buy index funds. Step 2: wait.

This is getting on a bit, but still probably the best book you'll find:

The Global Expatriate's Guide to Investing - Andrew Hallam

For what you put into the account, I'd suggest Smarter Investing by Tim Hale.

Personally, I think paying a regular sum into a index tracker over the long term is the easiest way to build wealth. That is what I do and many others on here but it depends on factors like timescale. I can wait 15-20 years.
As for books, I've seen this recommended on here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-3rd-edn-Decisions-ebook/dp/B00GAYHH8I/ref=sr_1_13?keywords=investing&qid=1558990767&s=gateway&sr=8-13

Personally, I would invest weekly in your situation. I don't see any benefit in waiting that week. The fee to you will be the same whether you do it once a year, once a week or once a fortnight. Do have a look into vanguard product's, they will automatically rebalance them which is handy. Sort of like a fire and forget investment.

But I cannot stress enough - you should read Tim Hale's Smarter Investing. You need to outline your goals and invest appropriately. Eg, if you're saving for a house and plan to buy in 5 years you would be better with a cash LISA...

£16.24 and it'll be the best investment you'll ever make. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0273785370/ref=tmm_pap_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=&sr=

Vanguard is actually as accessible as the UK FTSE - I'm not quite sure what you mean? You can go through your broker, Hangreaves Lansdowne and they will have all the funds available.
http://www.hl.co.uk/funds/fund-discounts,-prices--and--factsheets/search-results/v/vanguard-lifestrategy-80-equity-accumulation

It's that simple!

Get your hands on a copy of the Financial Times Guide to Investing. It's a great place to start.

The most commonly recommended one is Smarter Investing well worth the read

It's been a while now, but I think I got the idea from Expected Returns by Antti Ilmanen; it is an interesting read but it's quite heavy, so I only made it to chapter 4.

When you look at bonds I'd suggest you look at them in the form of bond index funds (from Vanguard and other fund providers). Avoid low-grade/"high yield" bonds (unless you really know what you're doing). I'd strongly suggest you read Tim Hale's book.

Edit: The other problem you've got is that bond yields are really low right now, so for relatively small amounts you might do better (even after tax) with cash in high-interest current accounts for the more stable part of your portfolio. But again, you'd have to do your own research - I put everything into S&S ISAs because I have a longer horizon and don't want to lose out on the tax-free allowance when bond yields rise again, even though for now it might give better returns in high-interest current accounts.

Thanks!
During his degree, my friend who is currently in the machine learning engineer role had only studied one or two modules (out of 6 per year) of machine learning but still got the job. I believe they start with even more training than the software development grad scheme I'm on. I think it's 1-2 months of training before you start doing proper work.

The textbook was this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guided-Signature/dp/0321503627/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1VLKSUNCURZGL&keywords=test+driven+development&qid=1555061804&s=gateway&sprefix=test+driven+%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-5

I'll PM you the company