Happy New Financial Year!

The financial year starts with some new ISA news. From 6th April 2024 you can open more than one of the same ISA type in the same financial year so you could open a Stocks and Shares ISA for long-term saving and have another for regular dealing with another provider.

The government are also trying to help the UK Stock Market by allowing an additional £5k to be invested into a UK equities-only ISA which means the annual savings limit could go up from £20k to £25k. Whether this attracts new investors into the market we will have to wait and see.

And now without further ado let's look at my current investments this year.

Stocks and Shares ISA - Hargreaves Lansdown

My ISA has become very boring as it now contains the same Index Fund as my daughter's and wife's accounts. All three of us now just hold the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap Accumulation index fund for simplicity. For the moment we are still with Hargreaves Lansdown and I plan to keep my daughter's ISA with them as they do not charge fees on the child's account. I am looking at other options such as Trading 212 but I am waiting to see whether they will be adding SIPPs to their offering. Hargreaves Lansdown has a lot of funds to invest in but the fees are not the cheapest around.

SIPP - Hargreaves Lansdown

Since the beginning of the year, my employer has been paying into my SIPP through salary sacrifice. I prefer this to NEST as I have control over where I want to invest and salary sacrifice means that I get to keep more of my salary and don't have to worry about claiming the additional 20% through a yearly tax return. My investments are split between six index funds which are listed below in order from the highest holding to the lowest.

• UBS S&P 500 - accumulation.
• Legal & General UK Index - accumulation.
• Legal & General European Index - accumulation.
• iShares Japan Equity Index - accumulation.
• iShares Pacific ex Japan Equity Index - accumulation.
• HL Global Corporate Bond - accumulation.

This has been a stable list now since opening the SIPP with the exception of the Corporate Bond which as a HL member I switched to from an Artemis High Income fund for an introductory offer last summer.

Myself - Foundation Degree

Back in December, I started my foundation degree in Fire Engineering. This is taking up a lot of my time as the coursework questions for the latest module are equivalent to a dissertation. Thankfully my final taught module is in June followed by a final dissertation-style report so I hope to be finished before the end of summer; as long as I don't need to re-do any of the work. As per my post on investing in yourself, I hope this will help with my new career.

Financial Negative - Mortgages

Like a lot of people in the UK I am coming off a cheap fixed-rate mortgage deal and from May it will go up from 1.99% to 4.29%. It's a fair old hike but still lower than it could have been a few months ago. I have decided to fix for another 5 years as I don't see rates going down substantially any time soon. The additional money going on the mortgage will kibosh my short-term investing but luckily at least it is still affordable for me.

The Future...

I will be following the advice from one of my top 5 YouTube finance channels and I recommend you do too: Take it away James...