Good morning 👋

I regularly have conversations with people who are sitting on a lot of cash. Personally, and in their business.

Obviously 'a lot' is relative.

Three to six months of personal essential spending set aside as an emergency fund is smart. Holding it in a flexible cash ISA means you have easy access and don't have to include it on your tax return or worry about paying any tax on the interest.

And if you've planned out the next 6-18 months and need money for something specific, work on the house, a car, school fees, a big holiday, keeping that in cash makes complete sense.

The same with your business cash. Depending on your cashflow, keeping 6-12 months overheads in a cash account is probably sensible.

So cash is great. Having cash is not the problem.

But when does it get to be too much?

If there's surplus money that's been sitting in a savings account for a year, two years, longer, and you don't really have a plan for it... that's worth thinking about.

Because in my experience it usually means something else is going on underneath.

Sometimes it's just not knowing where to start.

Everyone understands cash, but investing can feel like one of those subjects with a language nobody ever properly explains.

ISAs, funds, platforms, risk profiles, bonds, equities...

So you do nothing. Because doing nothing feels less risky than doing the wrong thing.

Sometimes it's a bad experience.

Maybe you invested once before and it didn't go well. Maybe someone put you into something that lost money, or you felt out of your depth, or you didn't really understand what you'd bought.

The thing is though, a bad experience with investing is almost always a bad experience with the wrong advice. Or no advice. The problem wasn't investing itself. It was how it was done.

And lets not even get started on the world at the moment.

Oil prices. The Middle East. Trade tariffs. Media reports that 'markets' are up one day, down another.

It feels like a bad time to put money into the markets.

But there's always something. Go back through any year in the last twenty and you'll find a perfectly good list of reasons not to invest.

And yet the people who had a decent strategy and stuck with it are in a very different position from the people who kept waiting for things to calm down, for the 'right' time.

The people I work with who feel genuinely confident about their money aren't the ones who timed everything perfectly.

They're the ones who have a clear strategy that already accounts for the difficult times. They don't need to check the news before deciding whether to stay invested. That thinking was already done, the foundations are solid.

It's a bit like going to the gym. The people who actually go consistently aren't the ones who feel motivated every morning. They're the ones who go because it's Tuesday and that's what they do on Tuesdays. No debate. The decision was already made.

A sound investment strategy works the same way. You're not reacting to headlines. You're following a plan that was built for exactly this kind of weather.

And every year that money sits in cash beyond what you actually need, inflation is quietly eating into what it can do for you. Not dramatically or overnight. But steadily. The safe option has a cost too. You just don't get a statement showing it.

If reading this article has made you think 'yes that's me', doing something about it is probably easier than you think. Drop me a reply and let’s have a chat about it.

Have a great week 😎

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