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How Moneybox helped me painlessly save and invest £722.50 in 15 months

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This is a follow up to an earlier post I wrote called How you can save money effortlessly using Monzo, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and Moneybox and an update to how the Moneybox part is doing.

How Moneybox helped me painlessly save and invest £722.50 in 15 months

Automatic equals painless

Ramit Sethi is all about having systems in place so that you don’t have to use your willpower. Because willpower is fickle and it gets exhausted and it doesn’t always work.

Systems on the other hand do work. Such as setting up automatic payments to come out of your account straight after pay day to go into your savings account or into your investment account. This way you don’t even think about it. This is how I’ve set up my Marcus savings account and my Hargreaves Lansdown ISA. It comes out of my account and automatically saves and invests for me. I don’t have to think about it and I don’t have to remember to manually make the transfer or the investment.

What is Moneybox?

Moneybox is a mobile app that I started using in February 2019 and it’s designed to make saving and investing super simple and painless. I use the iOS version.

How does Moneybox work?

In the Moneybox app, you connect your bank accounts that you spend money with eg. Monzo or HSBC as I use. You decide to round up transactions to the nearest pound or two pounds (as I’ve started to do). So let’s say you have a transaction for a coffee at £2.50. You could choose to round it up to the nearest pound (£3.00). Your Monzo account would show a £2.50 to the coffee shop, whilst the 50p round-up would be added to the Moneybox weekly pot. (50p might not sound like a lot but it all adds up. Like my mum used to say, watch the pennies, watch the pounds.)

Once a week the amount in the Moneybox weekly pot is taken from your chosen bank account (with which you’ve set up a direct debit). For me, it’s generally about £10 to £20 that’s built up over the week and this is swept from my HSBC account to Moneybox who then invest it in a Stocks and Shares ISA according to your chosen risk appetite in a simple mix of funds.

(The choice of mix of funds is Cautious, Balanced, and Adventurous, where Cautious has the least equity funds and more bond funds, and Adventurous has the highest allocation of equity funds. Mine is in the Balanced mix, which is 65% global equities, 10% global property shares and 25% corporate bonds.)

You can also ‘boost’ your savings with Moneybox through one-off injections of £10, £20 etc. The app shows you how that can positively impact your total savings and investments over a longer time horizon.

How much have I saved and invested through the app?

As of today (26th May 2020), I’ve got a grand total of £722.50 in the ‘balanced’ mix of funds. I’m chuffed to bits with that because it was easy. I didn’t even have to think about it. It was almost literally made up of the loose change in my pocket.

What’s been my return on my investment?

As at 26th May 2020, £1.50! That’s 0.21%! Not great I know 🙂 but remember we have just had a big correction in equity markets due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and we’re in this for the longer term. It was a negative return for a while during March and April 2020.

Would I recommend Moneybox?

Absolutely! It’s genuinely painless. I don’t even think about it anymore. The app is easy to use and the act of ’rounding up’ and ‘boosting’ your weekly pot is fun and almost delightful. It’s a well-designed app.

If you struggle with saving and investing, if maybe you don’t have the discipline to manually save and invest each month or just regularly, then this type of app/system could be what you’re looking for.

Check out Moneybox here!

The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

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Angelique gave this book to me in May 2014 and it’s taken a lockdown in 2020 for me to read. Sorry Babe!

Anh Do is a famous artist and comedian in Australia and he tells his story of how he and his family escaped post-war Vietnam by boat and eventually settling in Australia. Anh and his brother were infants at the time of the crossing. The section on the family’s journey by small fishing craft is harrowing. They encounter pirates who take everything they have, lose family members overboard until they’re rescued by Germans.

When they arrive in Australia, the adult members of the family are amazed by the land of plenty, and are so grateful to “this great country”, where they can start a new life and where hard work is rewarded. Anh’s parents work all hours so that they can provide a better life for their 3 children. The boys are sent to a private school and Anh is very open and honest about how much he loved the school and his mates, but also at the same time never felt like he truly belonged as money was tough for the Do family. By this time, his father had left the family and his mother was a single parent.

Anh’s relationship with his father is complicated. On the one hand, his father is a larger than life character who led his family across the seas to Australia, and did daring feats of courage and bravery, and instilled a strong sense in his children that they could do anything, and that they should go for everything. But on the other hand, guilt drove him to drink and sadly violence towards his own family.

Ahn’s story of how he made it in comedy is inspiring, and his storytelling of important parts of his life is compelling. I particularly enjoyed the story of his engagement party, where Vietnamese met Aussies with a metre long pig!

He writes with raw honesty, and the book is filled with very personal stories. It was a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Vietnamese boat people and growing up in 1990s Australia.

How can we make lockdown a more edifying experience?

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When I was at uni, I took an Aesthetics class. The Philosophy of Art. I don’t remember much from that course except for a couple of essays on Plato and Tolstoy.

Plato was keen that when educating the young men of his Republic that their art be censored and that the youth should only consume art that promoted nobility. So poetry shouldn’t be about loucheness and hedonism, rather they should be about promoting bravery in battle and moral uprightness.

I was reminded of this recently after binge-watching a series of Mindhunter on Netflix, a show about the FBI’s profiling of serial killers in the 1970s. This is show that goes deep into the minds and motivations of deeply disturbed people, and it’s very entertaining and very compelling. We watched this off the back of Unabomber, another Netflix show, this time about the hunt for another serial killer, Ted Kaczynski. Again very entertaining and compelling.

The question I had was: “is this type of show good for me? Is it making me a better human?”

You might say “lighten up mate, it’s just a show”.

But is it just a show? Say that you watch 2 of these series. That’s nearly 20 hours of dark subject matter. Are we really saying that this has no effect on your brain, on your neural pathways? By exposing yourself to the fetishes of psychopaths, is your own mind becoming corrupted or infected? What are you consuming to offset this? What positive, elevating content are you consuming to counteract this negativity?

Let’s look at what Plato might recommend for our viewing consumption.

Say you watch one hour of TV a day after work. Instead of Netflix, imagine that for one month you watched TED Talks. A TED Talk is around 15 mins, so that’s 4 TED Talks a day. That’s 120 TED Talks a month. How much more elevated do you think you’d be on this diet as opposed to on just consuming Netflix?

We can do the same with our other channels of consumption. Take Instagram. If you wanted to lose weight, replace the photos of burgers and huge pizzas with buddha bowls and salads. Make your feed one that is congruent with your overall goals.

Who knows how long we’re going to be in lockdown for? But we could make the best use of it possible. Instead of bingeing Narcos, then Narcos Mexico, maybe we could watch Roma, an Oscar-winning piece of world cinema? Instead of being glued to the news, we could listen to long pieces of the greatest classical music.

One of my best mates who’s currently in lockdown in Rome asked his parents for some musical inspiration to listen to during the Easter weekend. They came back with Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St John Passion. We listened to the Messiah on full whack yesterday, which was elevating, and reminded me of a goal I’ve had for years after reading an interview with Emmanuelle Beart who blared out classical music in her country house during the interview (maybe that story doesn’t travel well!).

During this lockdown, we can read the great books we’ve put off, or listen to the full Ring Cycle (18 hours), or watch the greatest films in the world, do 1,000 pressups, take virtual tours of the world’s greatest galleries (like the Rijksmuseum) and museums online and using mobile phone apps. Do things and consume things that elevate and edify.

Right off to listen to the St John Passion. Why don’t you join me?!

Cooking more during the lockdown

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I’m a creature of habit. At home, we eat the same food all the time: a bit of protein always like steak, salmon, fish cakes, some carbs (generally pasta), and some veg (we’re very partial to broccolini as it cooks so quickly).

In lockdown, however, I crave foods I’d never normally cook as I can get them in restaurants or by a takeaway. Deliveroo doesn’t have that many options as many restaurants have shut completely.

I wanted duck pancakes, so I bought ingredients that were closest to them. We had some hoisin sauce already (but no yellow bean sauce, which is the main flavour in duck pancakes). I bought some duck legs ready to be roasted from Sainsbury’s, and some Mission small tortillas (for the ‘pancakes’), some cucumber and spring onions to be finely sliced.

I also craved a proper burger, and bought some beef burgers, lettuce, white onions and soft white bread rolls, I couldn’t find any cheese slices but it was still excellent. Since making these, I found another great video by Sam The Cooking Guy on his ultimate burger:

Next, I’ve got the ingredients to recreate a dish my mum used to make: cod or haddock, braised with lots of garlic, onions, and tomatoes.

Plus a butterflied small leg of lamb for Easter Sunday, which I’ll do either as a roast or as a curry (but leaning towards a traditional roast studded with garlic).

On my next shop, I’ll get the ingredients for making wor tip potstickers following this recipe: https://steamykitchen.com/41178-best-chinese-potsticker-dumplings-recipe.html

It’s a great time to actually go through the cookbooks we have, like Polpo (some beautiful meatball recipes and salads) and Barrafina (croquetas mmm) and Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi, and actually knuckle down and make them.

What are you cooking during the lockdown?

What has the lockdown shown us about what’s really important?

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Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

On one hand, the lockdown has meant enforced self-isolation, grandparents not being able to see their grandkids, people being cooped up in often tiny flats, and a generation of homeschooled kids.

On the other hand though, we’ll never see these extraordinary times again. Less movement means less pollution. There’s reports of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice, stars being visible again. We’re spending a lot more time with our immediate families and wistfully pining after simple pleasures that we took for granted, such as going for walks when we wanted, going to the pub for a pint, going to the cinema to watch a movie, going to the shops to buy food whenever we wanted.

What’s really important?

Going out and enjoying nature. We’ve got great parks on our doorstep but we never go. We’ve got Richmond Park, Bushey Park, Hampton Court, Box Hill, Epsom Common, Wimbledon Common, and in normal times, we hardly ever go. We’ve got to change that once this is all back to normal.

Ticking off that bucket list. It’s so easy to forget about this once we back to the 9 to 5, the annual two-week holiday, life with kids etc. But we all know what’s on that bucket list, whether it’s climbing Mont Blanc, going on the Trans Siberian Railway, seeing the Pyramids. We don’t know when our number is up. We’ve just heard sadly that one of my sister’s friends, her aunt, died from Covid 19. Life is short. We don’t see black swans like a pandemic coming. Who’s to say that there won’t be a worse one in ten years time?

Family and friends above all. Not being able to see family and friends in the flesh has been strange. After all this is done, will we say “let’s catch up next week?” or will we say “let’s catch up today?”

Having a garden. Like many people in London, we’re in a flat. We’re lucky enough to have a balcony which is getting lots of morning sunshine. Now though, I’d love a garden. Having a respite in a beautiful home garden must be wonderful. Imagine cool shrubs, vibrantly coloured flowers, lush green lawns, fruit trees like apples and plums, maybe even a fig tree, a vegetable patch, fragrant herbs such as thyme and rosemary, and a dedicated space for BBQs and entertaining.

Good health. Being fit and healthy has given a good base with which to fight the coronavirus. A good strong immune system and having no underlying health problems is a boon. Eat well, take some good regular exercise, don’t smoke or drink too much.

Genuinely appreciating the little things. There was a wonderful piece on the BBC about an honour guard that NHS staff gave to a Leicestershire man called Hylton Murray-Philipson when he was discharged from hospital after being in intensive care with COVID-19. His gratitude at being alive was infectious to watch. He loved hearing the ‘birds twittering’, the daffodils in full bloom, the blueness of the sky, and he had a craving for simple marmalade on toast. Check out the story and video here.