Getting Started
Lump sum or drip feed, and what the evidence says
Investing all at once has usually beaten spreading it out. Doing so is also harder, and that matters.
Ceyda Aksoy
Contributing writer, The Investment Habit
Ceyda writes about getting started, and about how few decisions actually need making.
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13 articles
Getting Started
Waiting until you understand everything is a decision too
Delay feels like caution because it produces nothing visible. It is still a position, and it is one nobody chose deliberately.
Getting Started
The first year is about the habit, not the return
Twelve months of performance tells you almost nothing about your strategy and quite a lot about whether you will stick to it.
Getting Started
The one page to write before your first contribution
A written plan is not paperwork. It is a message from the calm version of you to the version who will read it during a crash.
Getting Started
Choose the allocation you can hold, not the one that optimises
A theoretically superior portfolio that gets abandoned in a bad year performs worse than a cautious one that survives it.
Getting Started
Your first market fall is the real induction
Everything you believe about your tolerance for loss is a hypothesis until a decline tests it with your own money.
Getting Started
The starting amount matters less than the standing order
Waiting for a respectable sum to begin with is a common and expensive form of delay.
Getting Started
What to do with the urge to check on day three
New investors check their balance constantly, and frequent checking makes a perfectly reasonable investment feel intolerable.
Drawing an Income
Buckets are a psychological device that happens to work
Splitting a portfolio into near, medium and long-term pots changes nothing about the total. It changes almost everything about how…
Getting Started
The cash buffer that keeps a portfolio intact
A separate pot of reachable cash is not competing with your investments. It is the thing that stops a broken boiler turning into a…
Getting Started
Your first mistake is cheap, and later ones are not
An error on a small balance costs a small amount and teaches the same lesson as an error on a large one. The lesson is the asset.
Drawing an Income
Spending does not stay flat across a retirement
Plans usually assume a constant amount adjusted for inflation. Real spending tends to be lumpier and to change direction more than…
Drawing an Income
Life expectancy is an average and you are not one
Planning to an average lifespan means roughly half of people outlive the plan. The distribution matters far more than the midpoint.