This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘Investment Clinic — I’m almost 50 — is it too late to start investing?’

Jane
I’ve always been sort of quite careful with money. I’ve always been conscious about saving money each month. 

Claer Barrett
Jane has been a diligent saver all her life. She’s 49 and has a six-figure portfolio. Problem is, it’s all in one asset. 

Jane
I have about 125,000 in savings. I’ve always just felt safer having the money in savings accounts rather than investing it and knowing that there could be risks.

Claer Barrett
Now, with an eye on the next phase of her life, she’s realising there are also risks of holding too much cash. 

Jane
I’m kind of wondering whether or not it’s too late to start investing and if so, where I begin and what I should do with this pot of cash. If I weather the storm with investing, I could probably make a lot more money. 

Claer Barrett
Jane is one of many listeners who got in touch with a problem to discuss in our newly opened Investment Clinic with me, Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor. In this special series of six episodes, I’ll be triaging plenty of different real-life investment dilemmas with the help of our financial experts. From 20-somethings figuring out their long-term strategy to older investors within touching distance of their retirement goals, we’ll be sharing real-life stories about investing that we hope will educate and inspire you, no matter what stage of your investment journey you happen to be at. As for Jane, she’s put off investing for decades. What can we all learn from her story? Let’s open up the Investment Clinic and get cracking.

Jane, welcome to our Investment Clinic. We’re so glad that you wanted to come on the show, because I think that a lot of people listening, especially women, are really going to feel a lot of empathy for your problem. So tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’ve come to Money Clinic. 

Jane
Thank you, Claer. I’m nearly 50 and I have about 125,000 in savings, cash savings. And I’m sort of conscious that I’m not getting a great return. I’m kind of wondering whether or not it’s too late to start investing. And if so, where I begin and what I should do with this pot of cash? 

Claer Barrett
Wow. Well, quite a problem to have, £120,000 worth of cash in savings accounts. Presumably quite a bit of that in cash Isas or? 

Jane
So only 40,000 in cash Isas. The rest of it is just in high-interest savings accounts or sort of fixed-term accounts for a year or two years, which are giving me 5 per cent, you know, last couple of years and now dropping down to sort of 4.25 per cent. 

Claer Barrett
Jane has been moving her money around to get the best interest rates. However, one problem for people with really high levels of cash savings is having to pay tax on savings interest. This doesn’t apply to money held within cash Isas, but if you earn more than £1,000 a year in interest from other accounts, there will be tax to pay. I asked Jane what sparked her excellent savings habit. 

Jane
I’ve always been sort of quite careful with money. I’ve been in my job for 27 years. I joined the company from when I graduated, and I’ve had the benefit of getting some money from share save schemes that I’ve been in, so that’s one thing. I’ve always been conscious about saving money each month. I did inherit 20,000 last year when my father passed away, but it has just literally been putting money aside each month. I’m just really risk-averse, Claer. I’m not going to lie. You know, I’m sort of been quite happy knowing that my money is in my savings account and I can see it. I know I’m not going to lose it, and I suppose I’ve not really know what’s been ahead, you know, sort of like, would I lose my job, you know, what would happen to me going forward. So I’ve always just felt safer having the money in savings accounts rather than investing it and knowing that there could be risks.

I look back naively now and think, you know, I shouldn’t have been like that, and I should have sort of weathered the storm and invested for, you know, the last 10 years. I know I probably would have been in a better financial position now. And all the books I read talk about putting small amounts away each month over long periods of time. But, you know, what do I do with lump sum amounts and how much do I do? 

Claer Barrett
All right, so I can understand that you’ve got this big lump sum, and investing it all in one go does seem quite a daunting thing. But is there any reason why you need so much cash? I mean, I’ve got a lot of cash at the moment because I’m trying to move house, for example. 

Jane
No, not at all, Claer. I know there’s no reason why I need so much at the moment. Our mortgage is nearly paid off. In fact, I could probably pay that off. And my son may or may not go to university, so I guess financially I may want to help him out, but there’s no reason for me to have so much readily available. No, there isn’t. 

Claer Barrett
OK. Now, you mentioned your job. You’ve been with the same employer for 27 years, which is impressive. Tell me about the pensions that you might have built up during your work life.

Jane
So I just have to say, I have worked part-time for quite a number of years since my son was born, so I don’t earn a great deal. But I did do initially when I started work. So I have a final salary pension with my company. 

Claer Barrett
Well done. 

Jane
That would give me a salary of 12,000 a year. 

Claer Barrett
Yeah, so a final salary pension, that gives you a guaranteed income in retirement every year until you die. The most generous type of pension. So by the time you retire, you’ll hopefully get the state pension if you have checked your state pension record. 

Jane
Yes, I did Claer. I am fully up to date with the contributions for that. Yes.

Claer Barrett
Excellent.

Jane
I’m now in a workplace pension scheme with Legal & General. 

Claer Barrett
OK. That will be a defined contribution pension. So most people listening, that’s the sort of pension they’ll have for building up a pot of money and then when you retire you need to decide what to do with it. And may I ask, roughly how much have you got in your Legal & General pension? 

Jane
Yeah, not an awful lot — 27,000 — because I started that when I went part-time and I haven’t been paying a lot into it. So I have just recently increased my contributions each month into that pension scheme. I’m currently now putting in 13 per cent and the company put in 4 per cent. 

Claer Barrett
So that’s an investment decision that you’ve made and you’re smiling, you feel positive about it. So talk me through how that decision went. 

Jane
Through learning about investing, and I knew that the workplace pension scheme was a tax-free, savvy way of saving money and that I will be able to access that if I need to from being 55 or 57. So I thought that was the best thing, rather than maybe saving money each month into my savings account to put that extra money into my workplace pension. The other thing I was going to do is I can overpay into that pension scheme as well. So that was one of my questions maybe to float. Should I be making additional contributions?

Claer Barrett
That’s a great question. 

Jane
And then the other way I know in which I could get some tax-free savings is through a stocks-and-shares Isa, which I’ve not got. So I know that I can open that and that’s what I’ll do next tax year. But then I don’t know what to do with it after that. Where to put it. 

Claer Barrett
What’s prompted this interest in investing? What is it that’s made you think, you know what, I’m 49. I need to look into this. 

Jane
I must have clicked on something on my Instagram and now I get lots and lots of feed about investing. And I’ve read books and I’ve been following different people on Instagram and they all say, stop wasting time, start investing. And that over a period of 10 years, I could probably make a lot more money if I weather the storm with investing than in my savings account. And I feel as if, you know, if I’m going to try and work to at least I’m 60, if not more, I need to try and make the most of these next 10 years or 15 years before I possibly think about retiring to maximise the cash that I’ve got. 

Claer Barrett
And you said earlier that it’s the fear of losing money, the fact that you’re very risk-averse, that stopped you in the past. Tell me a little bit more about your feelings around risk, because obviously with investing, the value of the money invested can go up and down. Or as I often say, can go down as well as up. How does that make you feel? 

Jane
I feel like now, having read more about it and seeing, on average, what the return can be over 10 years, even though it might go up and down one year. I’m sort of more confident that by putting some money in a way and leaving it for 10 years or five or more, that it generally will be better than the return I’ll get on my savings given the rate of inflation. 

Claer Barrett
And what other information have you picked up on social media about how you might do that? What kind of ideas have popped up? 

Jane
I was going to open a stocks-and-shares Isa, and then I was going to transfer in my old cash Isas and invest in a low-cost global index fund. 

Claer Barrett
OK. And with the global tracker, how much do you know about them? What sort of attracted you to that? 

Jane
I just know that that seems to be the most diverse way of investing, so that you’re not putting all your eggs into one basket. If a market in America goes up but drops in a different country, it’s a bit more diverse and a bit less risky. But then when I look at people who are investing at my age, they also seem to put some money in bonds. 

Claer Barrett
We call it asset allocation in the financial world. So not knowing how you should structure your investments. 

Jane
And that bit I don’t know, Claer. And that’s why I wondered if maybe I just need to just go with a financial adviser and they will sort it out for me or if I can do it myself. 

Claer Barrett
That is a very good question. But before we introduce Jane to the podcast experts, I asked about her relationship with her partner and how much they talk about money matters together.

Jane
Yeah, so Craig’s in a really similar situation to me. He has a similar amount in savings and we have a joint mortgage and he has final salary pension that’s worth more than mine. He also has more workplace pensions than I have. So he’s in a similar situation to me and he’s also thinking of investing. But his money is also in the highest interest savings accounts we can get. 

Claer Barrett
You’ve got your 50th birthday coming up. So obviously some party planning, holiday planning perhaps that’s going on in the background, but are we also seeing some retirement planning? 

Jane
Yes, absolutely. I mean, my retirement funds that I’ve got probably aren’t as great as Craig’s, but combined that would be OK. We’re definitely thinking about that and how to make the most of the savings that we’ve got. 

Claer Barrett
Well, you’ve done very well saving up as much. So listen, Jane, at this point in the podcast, I’m going to bring in our two podcast experts. But before I do an important disclaimer. We are going to be talking about investing and making investment decisions. But as ever, this is an educational discussion. It’s not intended as financial advice or a recommendation to buy any particular type of share, fund or security. You should always do your own research. But we really hope that what we’re about to discuss will give you and Jane some real pointers about how to approach tackling that. So without further ado, with me in the studio in London today, I have Emma Sterland, who is a financial planner at Evelyn Partners. 

Emma Sterland
Thanks, Claer. Nice to be here. 

Claer Barrett
And on the line in London, I have my FT colleague, Rosie Carr, who is the editor of our sister publication, the Investors Chronicle. Welcome, Rosie. 

Rosie Carr
Hi, Claer. Hi. 

Claer Barrett
So, Emma, you’ve been listening there. Jane, 49, going on 50. Wondering if it’s too late to think about starting investing. I’d imagine you get quite a lot of similar clients coming into your office in London asking the same question.

Emma Sterland
Absolutely. I think we get busy with life. We’re not very good at talking about money, so it’s very common to be kind of getting to this age, thinking about children, going off to university and retirement. So it’s a very common question we see. 

Claer Barrett
Now, first impressions about Jane’s situation. I mean, I think she’s done really well to be in the position she’s in. Not much mortgage left. Final salary pension obviously gives us some security of income in retirement. But she does have an awful lot of cash. 

Emma Sterland
Yes. I think as you said, you know, fantastic effort to be saving up. But it’s never too late to start investing. And definitely some things she could be doing with that cash. 

Claer Barrett
And, Rosie, I’ll bring you in here. You’ve been listening over the line. What are your first impressions about Jane’s situation? 

Rosie Carr
Jane, I have to say, as Claer did, that you know, well done for saving so much. And also actually for recognising that you probably have too much in cash. Keeping money in cash means that you are preventing it from growing. The higher returns that you would get from investing are going to be so important in later life. You know, if you’ve been invested in the US stock market over the past five years, your money would have grown by more than 80 per cent. And that would be in an S&P 500 tracker. 

Claer Barrett
Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. But volatility has returned to US stock markets thanks to President Trump’s tariffs. And that’s making Jane feel even more nervous about starting now. What does financial planner Emma suggest? 

Emma Sterland
So as I was listening along, Jane, to what you were saying, I think you don’t know your why, so there hasn’t been a reason to invest. So my starting point would be what is your financial plan? What are your goals and objectives in the short, medium and long term? So you’ve touched on the fact that your son may or may not go to university. What does that support look like? What would you like to do in the perfect world, and there isn’t a perfect world, but what would you love to do for him? When would you like to retire? You’ve mentioned 10 years. You’ve mentioned 15 years. And actually spending some time, whether it’s, Jane, just you or whether it’s with Craig together, spending some time were really giving those questions, some thought and then building a plan to say, OK, how do you achieve this? 

Claer Barrett
Because it’s not something that couples really talk about, is it? When are we going to retire? How are we going to manage the money when we do? What might we have? 

Emma Sterland
It’s not a great Saturday night dinner conversation, but I think it’s actually really important. And I think you’ve talked about some things that are really personal. Money is really personal. And I think it’s about what opportunity would investing bring. Would it mean that you could retire in 10 years and not 15 years? Would it mean you could help your son do something? Have you got something on your bucket list that you thought you’d never be able to financially achieve? And actually, if you bring that to life, then I think money becomes much more interesting. 

Claer Barrett
OK. So what are your thoughts, Jane, then about the plan going forward? Looking at your goals first and then working the numbers around that. 

Jane
Had not really thought that far ahead, if I’m really honest. You know, I guess naively, maybe my thoughts are just to try and make the most of this, some of this cash that I’ve got so that when I am 60, I’ve got more options available to me should I want to retire at 65 or sooner. For me, it’s just more about seeing the money grow so that over the next five, 10 years I can have a bit more of a plan. 

Claer Barrett
Jane says she wants to see her money grow as much as possible in the next 10 to 15 years before she retires, though it could stay invested for much longer than that. She’s rightly cautious about jumping in and investing a large lump sum. Going from 100 per cent cash to 100 per cent equities would be going from one risky extreme to another. But reallocating some of her cash into investments is the obvious step. Working out how much and how soon is her next challenge. And Rosie has some thoughts about how investors like Jane could start to frame this. 

Rosie Carr
Now, the reason it makes sense to drip feed money in is because you’re removing the risk, then, of buying shares or funds just ahead of a crash. And if you invest on a regular basis with monthly payments, it means that sometimes you buy when prices are rising and high, and then sometimes when they’re low and broadly it evens out. So you don’t have the shock of looking at the money you put in a week ago and realising that it’s lost 20 per cent of its value. That doesn’t happen that often anyway. But you still have choices. What you could do is decide, you know you’re going to invest a portion of that amount of cash. Let’s say you want to put £50,000 into an Isa. You might select five or 10 different funds and allocate an equal amount to each one. So you’re diversifying your investments immediately within the funds and then across different markets and maybe different investment styles. Or you could decide that maybe you’re just going to do that over the course of the next year, you’re going to put in £1,000 a month or £10,000 rather than all in one go. I mean, that does mean missing out on a lot of growth over the year. But the important thing really is just to get started. It is never too late. 

Claer Barrett
However Jane chooses to do this, she also needs to think about investing in the most tax-efficient way possible. She’s already decided to pay more of her monthly salary into a workplace pension. Opening a stocks-and-shares Isa is next on her list. UK adults can pay up to £20,000 into Isas each tax year. Cash, stocks and shares or a mixture of both. And once that money’s inside the Isa, there’s no tax to pay on future investment gains. But there’s a big potential pitfall Jane will want to avoid. 

Emma Sterland
So once you’re ready to make a decision around investing in stocks-and-shares Isas if that’s the right thing for you, then you can transfer the cash you’ve already got in the Isa wrappers into a stocks-and-shares Isa. You’re not using next year’s allowance because it’s just moving it from one type of Isa to the other. But there is an Isa transfer form so that it is clear that it was a previous year subscription and that you’re not using next year’s. Once you close that account down, you can’t reverse that. 

Claer Barrett
So if you have, say, £50,000 in your cash Isas, you can transfer that money to the stocks-and-shares Isa. And in this tax year, you could pay in whatever’s left of your Isa subscription. I don’t know if you’ve paid any money into your cash Isas in the last tax year, which runs from the 6th of April to the 5th of April. Let’s say you haven’t, you could do a £50,000 transfer, and then you could then pay in another £20,000. And then on the 6th of April, when the new tax year begins . . . 

Emma Sterland
You get another allowance. 

Claer Barrett
So potentially within the space of the next few months, you could get nearly £90,000 inside a stocks-and-shares Isa. 

Emma Sterland
Yeah. And my guidance to you at this point in the tax year, while you’re thinking about what you want to do, would be if you haven’t used this year’s Isa allowance, is to open it up in cash because I always think it’s about getting your decision right. Open it up in cash, bank the allowance and then that gives you a little bit of time to think about what your investment strategy is going to be. 

Claer Barrett
And I guess the same goes for Craig, Jane’s husband. If he’s got Isa allowance left this tax year. 

Emma Sterland
Definitely. If you’re comfortable looking at your financial affairs together, I really think it’s worth spending time making sure that you’ve got amounts in the right place. If you’ve got cash, start earning interest. Potentially some of that might be better in your name outside of the savings allowance that he has as well. 

Claer Barrett
The next issue for Jane: if she wants to open a stocks-and-shares Isa, she’ll need to pick an investment platform. Here are Rosie’s thoughts on what she needs to consider. 

Rosie Carr
I mean, there are so many of them and they all offer something different. And it depends what type of investor you are. If you’re going to buy individual shares, then you would look for a platform that has an account where the trading fees are ultra-cheap. But if you’re just going to invest in ETFs, exchange traded funds, you want an account where the fees on that type of trading is very cheap. But it’s the fees that you really need to focus on and making sure that you will be able to access the investment type that you want. 

Claer Barrett
Lots for Jane to think about, but she’s keener on investing using funds and diversifying her exposure rather than picking individual shares.

Rosie, tracker funds. They’re an investment that Jane has seen people talking about on social media. Talk us through how an investor could go about looking at building a portfolio with tracker funds, and also the role of bonds, and what that could mean for somebody like Jane. 

Rosie Carr
Well, passive funds are really good. There’s a wide variety of funds to choose from, every possible geography and sector and risk level as well. They make it very easy. It’s a super easy way to invest. You get really good diversification. You can get exposure to hundreds or thousands of companies at very low cost, and you don’t really have to do any of the work. That’s a really good base for any portfolio. And then you have the choice of adding, you know, additional types of exposure. On top of that, you might want to have some exposure to property, and you can do that through funds as well. Or even gold. You can buy gold ETFs. Bonds are considered to be generally lower risk than equities. And I think you know there are corporate bonds, government bonds. We’ve got gilts in the UK, treasuries in the US. So bonds can help to lower your risk because it’s you diversifying across assets. And that is definitely something, you know, that you can consider. 

Claer Barrett
Now a couple of times investors like Jane might encounter, Rosie, even they’re looking at different ways of diversifying their risks. Could you talk us through what multi-asset funds are but also what target date retirement funds are? 

Rosie Carr
Yeah, multi-asset funds, again, it’s like a ready-made portfolio. It comes with exposure to a range of asset classes. And it’s a fund that will buy funds of other managers. The risk there, I think, is that the costs can be higher than with you building your own passive portfolio and choosing the funds yourself because you have to pay for the extra layer of the manager charges. 

Claer Barrett
So it’s that trade-off between a convenient product, like a convenience food that’s been made for you. You pay a bit more for it, whereas if you’ve assembled all the ingredients yourself, you can probably do it for a bit cheaper. But I think in terms of getting started, it could be worth having a look at. But then target date retirement funds, they offer investors like Jane an easy choice. The target date is when you want to retire. 

Rosie Carr
Yeah, and the main benefit here, too, is that you are also getting exposure to a range of assets, and you would choose the mix that works best for your situation. So you might . . . if you’re in your 20s, your target date funds would have a very high equity content to maximise returns. And then later in life, these lifestyle funds would top down the equity exposure to keep the risk to a minimum at that stage. 

Claer Barrett
As investors approach retirement, their attitude towards risk can change. But any future decision Jane might make about the equity bond split in her Isa portfolio should also factor in the bedrock of the final salary pensions both she and her husband hold, providing them with the security of a guaranteed income in retirement on top of their state pension. Could this change the way she thinks about risk? 

Emma Sterland
If that gives you a comfortable lifestyle at 65 and 67 when those pensions kick in, that gives you lots of opportunity to think about what risks you could become comfortable with, because this other pot of money is there for the extras. It’s there to maybe help you also on the property ladder, it’s the big holiday or any other things that you’d love to do. Whereas if actually, on reflection, you said state pension and the defined benefit income added together isn’t quite enough, you might want to take a little bit less risk. You don’t have to take the same risk with all the pots. So I think for me it’s always about bringing it back to why are you investing? What is the reason that you’re taking it out of cash that has given you that comfort? And what is the upside of investing going to give you? What are the choices it’s going to give you in later life? And people live a lot longer now. So your retirement, if you retire at 60, could be 40 years. 

Claer Barrett
Emma’s right. If you’re in your 40s or 50s now, you can expect to have to fund a much longer retirement than your parents. Jane hasn’t been investing much, so her pension pot isn’t as big as she might like, but there are ways that she can start to catch up. As well as maximising her contributions going forward, Jane and Craig, for that matter, can also retrospectively use their pensions allowance and make sure they’re investing as much as possible, tax-free. 

Emma Sterland
You’ve got an annual contribution limit, but there’s also an opportunity to look back. 

Claer Barrett
At previous . . .  

Emma Sterland
At previous years, depending on your situation, maybe you’ve got unused allowances or maybe Craig’s got unused allowances. 

Claer Barrett
What do you think about that, Jane? 

Jane
I didn’t even know about the unused allowance. I think I’m already putting the maximum into my monthly contribution now, but I do know that I can put in some additional money. I didn’t know I could go back and do it retrospectively, so I don’t know anything about that. That’s all new to me. The unused allowances, I guess that’s over previous years I’ve not put the maximum in. 

Claer Barrett
That’s exactly right. So most people who aren’t super duper high earners, they’ve got an annual pensions allowance of £60,000. And that’s a combination of what contributions they pay in and what their employer pays in. Now, Jane, I know you’re diligently taking notes on all of these, which is fantastic, but I do wonder, have you ever considered speaking to a financial adviser? Emma, you are a financial adviser, so no doubt you will say yes. Speaking to one is a worthwhile investment, but what would your pitch be to someone who’s considering seeking professional advice? 

Emma Sterland
So of course I’m going to say yes. I think there’s very few people who wouldn’t benefit from seeking financial advice. It is a minefield and the rules are complex and there’s lots of choice. And making these decisions is not just about what the textbook says, it’s also about how you emotionally feel about the money and what’s important. And I think about it in a different way. We spend time, money and effort on all the things that are kind of insignificant. Yet when we say, is it worth investing? And I’m not saying it’s an insignificant amount of money to pay for advice, but to secure you for the rest of your life, I just don’t think there’s a decision. 

Claer Barrett
And how should somebody like Jane approach finding an adviser? What are the tips that you would give her? 

Emma Sterland
I mean, clearly, the starting players will be, you know, friends and family that are already seeking advice. Lots of the people I deal with, they refer their friends and family to me because this is about you building a trusted relationship that you feel you can be honest about what’s important, and taking the time to make sure that you understand and you’re heard. All the things that you’ve said are absolutely valid and someone needs to take time to go with you. 

Claer Barrett
And then the questions that somebody like Jane should ask. Most advisers will give you a free session upfront to talk about your ideas. What should she be asking them in that? 

Emma Sterland
At this point, I think, Jane, you’re not clear whether or not you want to make an investment decision by yourself with information, or whether actually, at this point in your experience, you want to hand over that decision to somebody else. So asking the question of who you’re speaking to about what range of services that they have available, so that as you go on that journey, you’re comfortable they can help you, whatever option that might be. 

Claer Barrett
Jane, what have you taken from being on the podcast today? What do you think you’re going to leave the studio and go away and get on with in the coming weeks and months? 

Jane
Yeah, it’s just been really helpful, I think, just giving me the push really to stop talking about investing and actually crack on with it. And I think probably to, you know, like Emma said, I think in the back of my mind, getting some financial advice keeps coming up. I think that’s perhaps what stopped me from going it alone on some of the investment platforms. I’ve just got, you know, a significant amount of cash that I want to make work for me. So I think may be going away and looking into getting some financial advice is probably going to be my next step. And obviously, taking into consideration my longer-term goals and where I want to be in the next 10 years, and just seeing it a bit more broadly.

Claer Barrett
Rosie, is there anything else that you’d like to add? 

Rosie Carr
Obviously, there are more male investors in the world than female. That’s for a combination of factors. Women tend to be cautious. But a lot of the female investors that I’ve spoken to over the years, they’re also the same thing. That they didn’t think investing was for them. That it was for men in suits or people who like taking risks. And they’re worried that they didn’t know enough, but they discover that actually investing was for them. Dip your toe in. See how you get on. 

Claer Barrett
Jane, it’s been a pleasure having you in our Investment Clinic today. Good luck with your future decisions. Whether you make them alone, with your partner, with or without the help of a financial adviser. But wishing you all the best for the future. 

Jane
Thank you. And thank you, all of you. That’s been great. Thanks for your help. 

Claer Barrett
And thank you very much to Rosie Carr. 

Rosie Carr
Thanks, Claer. 

Claer Barrett
And to Emma Sterland. 

Emma Sterland
Thanks, Claer. 

Claer Barrett
As our experts have said, it’s never too late. And at 49, Jane potentially has four decades or more ahead of her. Focusing on the long-term journey rather than the short-term turbulence, and redirecting some of that powerful monthly savings habit into a monthly investing habit could open up new possibilities for her in the future. And if speaking to an adviser helps her and her husband map this out confidently, then I think that’s cash well spent.

On our next episode, I’ll be talking to a 29-year-old investor from Manchester who’s worried about his exposure to American stock markets. And how about you? If you’d like to appear on the next series of my Investment Clinic and have a chance to chew the fat with a panel of experts, then get in touch. Our email address is money@ft.com, or follow me on TikTok or Instagram. I’m @ClaerB.

And finally, this podcast is intended as a general discussion. It’s not intended as financial advice or any kind of investment recommendation. Everyone’s financial situation is different, and you should always do your own research before you make any investment decisions.

Investment Clinic is produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval, with sound design and mixing by Breen Turner, Sam Giovinco and Joe Salcedo. Manuela Saragosa is the show’s executive producer and Cheryl Brumley is the global head of audio.