Ryan King: How I Built a £180,000 Investment Portfolio in 8 Years

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[00:00] Sammie: Welcome back to the Money Gains Podcast. Today we have Ryan from Making Money Simple back on the show. Ryan, how you doing, man?

[00:00] Ryan: I’m very good, Sammie. Thank you for having me back, mate. How are you?

[00:00] Sammie: Mate, I’m good, I’m good. Last time we spoke, you were in Australia. Is that still the case?

[00:14] Ryan: I’m still in Australia, but I will be coming back to the UK very soon. So yeah, still here right now in Melbourne.

[00:20] Sammie: Half the press, half the press. Exclusive.

[00:25] Ryan: Yeah, it’s not going to be any front page headlines, unfortunately. Maybe in a few years, but not right now.

[00:25] Sammie: Is that to do with the Arsenal parade?

[00:25] Ryan: Arsenal parade, and using my ISA allowance in the new tax year. And the fan movie [?] as well, but those are the two most important reasons, obviously.

[00:41] Sammie: Last time you spoke, it was a pretty crazy time for you. The book had just dropped, and I think your portfolio at the time had hit like 140k, and that was a big jump for you from where it was. And I think today I’d love to go through how to get someone properly started in investing, because you take quite a different approach to some of the other people online. You keep it very, very simple, it’s in the name. But the book is amazing, and I hope it’s done really well, and by the sounds of it, it has. I think it’s been a big journey, but give us a bit of an update from that point on. What’s been going on for you?

[01:21] Ryan: Yeah, so last time I was back in the UK… I actually came back in May 2025 for a wedding, but I came back in November 2024 when I saw you in London, and that was a bit of a Stop, Wait and Start Investing book tour. I’ve had a few messages since then from people. The main thing is getting people started with investing, and that’s what the book sort of does, and we’ll go through it in this episode. But since then, really, I’ve been working as a chartered accountant in Australia. I was doing that up until November 2025, and I’ve recently gone full-time doing Making Money Simple. So I’m still building my portfolio, my investment contributions are a bit more ad hoc now, but on the other side of the coin, I’ve now got the perspective of investing while being self-employed through a limited company. So it’s given me an all-encompassing picture of investing as an employee, as a self-employed person, and as a limited company director. Hopefully it’s adding to the content and adding more strings to my bow, essentially. But yeah, really, my investment portfolio now… it was actually about £185,000 at the peak. It’s now dipped a bit as World War III started recently, unfortunately, so now it’s about £178,000. But my approach is the exact same regardless of me being employed or not. My investments are the exact same regardless of what country I’m in. And as you mentioned, I try and keep it all as simple as possible.

[02:39] Sammie: So talk to us a little bit about this, because you’ve made some videos about what you’ve done with your strategy. You’ve moved some money around recently. What were the reasons for that? I think it was something to do with your pension, right?

[02:50] Ryan: Yeah, so I’m a big fan of consolidating pensions. I had two workplace pensions in the UK, which I consolidated into a SIPP. I did that for the first time in 2022 and the second time in 2025. And I then recently moved my Australian workplace pension, which is called a superannuation, to another provider. It’s with Vanguard Australia, because I use them for my normal investing account over here in Australia. I think the biggest thing is that a lot of people have a lot of jobs and they forget about money, and there are billions lost in UK workplace pensions, I think it’s about 30 billion. So the most important thing is that it’s your money, it’s being invested, and you don’t want to be 60 trying to contact an employer from 30 years ago trying to find money that would have probably grown a lot over the decades. So from an admin point of view, that’s the biggest reason why I like it. But it also normally gives you lower fees and better investment options as side points. And also, because I’ve lived in two countries, I have so many investing accounts, so I try and consolidate the important ones anyway, just so it’s easier to manage. On that, because I do talk about this a bit, the most important thing to always check before moving any account, but pensions specifically, is just make sure there are no exit fees, and there probably shouldn’t be in this day and age. Secondly, and most importantly, particularly if it’s an older UK workplace pension, just make sure you’re not losing any perks, benefits or guarantees. You might get an earlier access age, a larger tax-free lump sum, not so much in the last five or ten years, but maybe with pensions from the nineties or the noughties. Long story short, before you move any pension, just call up the provider and ask. And obviously all that applies to your standard nine-to-five workplace pensions and private pensions. When it comes to NHS pensions, teachers’ pensions, they’re all different, that’s a different kettle of fish. But yeah, long story short, consolidating pensions to keep the admin burden as low as possible.

[04:52] Sammie: It’s really interesting you say that, because my mum found £65,000 in a lost workplace pension.

[04:59] Ryan: Wow.

[04:59] Sammie: So it can be quite an interesting thing. I think the average is £9,800 sitting per person, and something like 2.8 million people have roughly £31 billion in unclaimed pensions, because a lot of people still to this day leave a job and think, oh, that’s not my pension anymore, that’s not my money. But it’s always your money. Thankfully the government are putting out a pension tracing service very soon, a digital tracker where you can pop all your details in and see where they are. But as you say, you can phone them up and bring them all together. I think if that is the case and you have loads, it’s often worth looking at all of those providers, what the reviews are like, what the fees are like, what the exit fees are if you’re moving money around, so you can keep more but also have a good breadth of investment options. Would you agree with that?

[05:55] Ryan: Yeah, I completely agree. To be honest with you, for most people who are just going to put their money into a low-cost fund, as we’ll come on to later in the podcast, the most important thing is just to look at the fees. I think the biggest UK workplace pension provider is NEST, and I had a call with someone recently and was looking at their specific fees, and they were paying 1.8% per year, which is an insane fee to pay in this day and age. The most you want to pay in each investment account is 0.5% at the most. It’s a bit more difficult in workplace pensions, some of them are more old school, but you can do it now for less than 0.1% on a lot of platforms, though the most you want to pay is 0.5%. So when you’re paying 2%, 3%, if you can lower your fees, I’d say that’s the most important thing. And then those other things are important too, liking the platform, it having good reviews, the investment offering. One thing to point out here is if you have a current workplace pension, one that’s active and you’re currently contributing to every month, you normally don’t have any say over that, unfortunately. So even if your fees are bad or the fund offering’s bad, unfortunately you’ve probably just got to bite the bullet, because you don’t want to miss out on the employer match, that’s free money. So you might have to suck up the higher fees while you’re at that job. But the most important thing is if you do leave and that pension is no longer active, that’s when you can start looking to consolidate and lower your fees and get better options, and not add to those stats of having billions in lost money. I’m glad your mum found that though, that must have been a good night out, a good holiday.

[07:37] Sammie: No, yeah, she’s probably spent it already. My two sisters moved to Australia, as you know, and we met up on Bondi Beach, that was good fun, man. And my mum goes out there all the time, and she seemed to be living the life when she was out there, so I don’t know what’s going on with that pension.

[08:01] Ryan: That’s the pension coming in.

[08:03] Sammie: Safe to say, I don’t think I’m getting much of an inheritance. But I think one of the really key points about what you said is what someone can do when they do have that workplace pension, and often the fund provider of your pension, you may be put into a default fund and have different investment options available. Do you know much about that, the default funds and how you can move those around?

[08:28] Ryan: Yeah, and you actually mentioned this already, but the most important thing to say, and why that question is important, is that if you have a workplace pension, it’s your money and it is being invested. And it’s probably going to be your biggest and most important investment account, because you, your employer, plus the tax relief are all going into that pot, potentially for 40 years. So it’s not unsurprising, even on very modest, below-average incomes, to have multiple six figures when you compound all of those thousands of pounds of contributions per year over a working life of four decades. But what often happens is a lot of people bury their head in the sand. I’m not going to lie, it’s a pain in the backside, you log into this old-school website, there’s all this random jargon, you don’t know what’s going on. But I think the best thing I’ve ever done is switching my very first workplace pension from the default fund to a different fund. I was auto-enrolled into a life strategy type fund, it had some cash, some bonds, and a 0.78% fee, which is quite high. I was 21 at the time, I’d just started working in London, training to be a chartered accountant. I was lucky, I was educated, to be fair, because I’d read a few books over the previous few years. But I thought, I can’t access this money for 35 years, probably longer by the time I get there, I want to be in the most aggressive fund. So I switched the money from that fund to essentially the lowest cost global fund I could find, from a default fund to a global stock market fund. My fees came down by 0.2%, so it was a 75% fee cut. And before I consolidated that pension into my SIPP, I looked at the five-year returns. The default fund was 11%, and the fund I switched to was 76%. So it literally 6x’d my returns in a five-year period. I’m not trying to say I’m some sort of genius or like Warren Buffett, certainly not, it’s just a low-cost global fund, it always sounds smart or technical, but I literally just took ownership of it. I knew what I wanted, I wanted a more aggressive approach, I switched, and it’s already put thousands of pounds in my pocket over that short time period, and over the next 30 years until I access it, it’s going to keep doing that, because it’s a more aggressive approach, so it should hopefully. So what should you actually do? This is where it gets a bit difficult, because there are so many workplace pension providers, and different providers offer different funds. Firstly, you need to get access to your current workplace pension and all your workplace pensions. That’s a massive pain in the backside, but you’ve just got to spend a few hours doing it and keep thinking, it’s your money, and this could potentially be tens of thousands, maybe more, in decades’ time. So it’s worth spending the time now to get access to that money. Once you have access, you want to log in, and different platforms look different, but you should see your account, and your money will probably be in one fund. This is probably the most difficult part of the process, you want to click into the fund and see where the money’s actually being invested. To talk you through my thought process, my fund had some money in bonds, some in cash. Normally with workplace pensions, because they’ve got an appeal to the masses, to millions of people, they put you in a fairly cautious fund, which isn’t necessarily bad. But if you’re a bit more aggressive, if you’ve got two, three, four decades until you access this money, switching, in my opinion, to a more aggressive fund is probably going to put, potentially, if you’re a high earner, hundreds of thousands of pounds in your pocket over the long term. It does feel nerve-wracking, because you’re the one clicking the buttons, it is your money. But if you can make that switch if it’s best for you, and then just leave it, it could put loads of money in your pocket over the long term. It’s definitely important, as you mentioned, to look at the default fund, see what your money’s actually invested into, and then potentially switch it. Saying all that, some workplace pensions are quite good and low fee, but I’ve looked into probably dozens over the years when I speak to people, and normally you can lower your fees or switch to a fund that’s better suited for you, maybe a more aggressive fund. That’s normally one of the best things for most people, from my experience.

[13:32] Sammie: It’s really interesting you say that, because I like to look at this as, let’s say for example you earn another £50,000 over your investment lifetime, I’m not saying that’s going to be the case, please don’t take this as gospel, it’s just an example, you always have to make these caveats these days because you never know. Let’s say that’s the amount, and it took you two hours to fix, and you end up making that much more because of that decision, well, that’s a £25,000-per-hour rate.

[14:03] Ryan: Yeah, it’s insane.

[14:05] Sammie: When are you ever going to get that in your life? It’s probably one of the most important couple of hours you will spend. When you say three or four hours, it depends how many it takes and it depends on the platform as well. Some of them are annoying, where they have to send you a code letter through the post that you then put in, it’s so old school. Some are fantastic, and you can literally click in five minutes and you’re done. I also say to people, phone them up, because they work for you, you don’t work for them. They have to provide you with all of the information and advice and talk you through it as part of what they’re offering. And there are some fantastic tools and websites out there, even just Trustpilot and looking at some of the reviews about how people use it, or a walkthrough on YouTube is a great place to start. It’s such an easy thing to do. The reason I say that about the default fund is because we worked out my mum was in a default fund. If she’d moved her money to a more balanced fund, slightly more aggressive but nowhere near as cautious as that fund was, we worked out she’d have had £110,000, quite literally nearly double the amount over that lifetime, and that was just from a slightly more balanced fund, not even the aggressive, 100%-in-the-stock-market type fund. So it is an interesting decision. If you’re later in life and you’re watching this, there’s a bit more of a cautious approach you might want to take. But equally, if you haven’t got enough in your pension, you might want to be a touch more aggressive to try and get your numbers up a little bit. But again, it’s a game and you’ve got to balance that out, there are different strategies for different age points and different risk tolerances, and some people are way more on it, like you, and want to see these things grow a lot faster. Some people are just like, no, I’m all right with the lower percent and the lower risk, I’ve made my peace with that and I’m totally fine. But there’s no wrong or right answer when it comes to that, you just need to be able to ask yourself those questions, and that can change throughout your lifetime, which I think is really important. But let’s start from zero. Someone listening to this right now has got some money in a savings account, they’ve maybe built up their first emergency fund, they’ve got a couple of months’ worth sitting there earning three or four percent. Why should they care about investing their money?

[16:28] Ryan: The bottom line is that it’s impossible to save your way to wealth. Your money in a bank account, even earning the highest rate, even if you switch every year to get the best rate, is very unlikely to keep up with inflation. So in the best-case scenario, you’re essentially retaining the purchasing power of your money. But in most cases, people are actually getting poorer every year by keeping money in their savings. Now, don’t get me wrong, saving is a good skill to have, we need to save, as you mentioned, for an emergency fund, maybe for a house deposit, maybe use regular savers for a holiday or Christmas presents. But I think the biggest way to look at it is if you have money that’s just been sitting in the bank for years, five years, ten years, longer, it would have just been decimated by inflation. I looked at this about a week ago when I was writing an email, and over the last ten years alone, cumulative inflation, as per the Bank of England, so it’s massively understated, is 40% based on their records. So if you get £10,000 under the mattress, it’s still £10k. If you put it in a bank account, you might have about £13,000 if you switched and got the best rate every year, but that would still be worth less in real terms, in what we can actually buy, because of inflation. That’s the under-the-mattress and savings example. Over the last ten years, the global stock market, which is probably the easiest way to invest, as we can chat through, was up 210%, and that doesn’t even include dividends. So you would have probably tripled, maybe quadrupled your money, it’s massively smashed inflation. Of course, there are a lot of crashes, it’s very volatile, it is nerve-wracking. But if you just get the money invested and ignore it for a decade, you’re probably going to be much better off and actually grow your wealth, beat inflation, and have a go at retiring early, maybe having a more comfortable retirement, rather than saving everything, which is important, but ultimately the money’s just going to keep losing out to inflation, and that’s why investing is so important.

[18:36] Sammie: I think it’s really interesting, because both me and you are around about that decade mark, right, and we’ve got really similar amounts invested, and we’ve kind of tracked each other along the way. Every time you do a video about, oh my god, I’m really like 2k off that, or I’m slightly above one time and you’re slightly ahead another, it’s so interesting, because it can be that difference, as you said, a decade can actually make a real, tangible difference to your entire financial picture. So let’s put some real numbers on it, for example, if someone had £200 a month or something like that that they could put away, in your experience with this, I’m not expecting you to just reel off compound interest calculations.

[19:24] Ryan: Let me pull it up quickly, behind the assumptions.

[19:28] Sammie: But is that enough to potentially change your life in 20 or 30 years’ time, for example?

[19:34] Ryan: It definitely is. I was actually looking at this recently, even £100 a month, the bare minimum. First of all, most people will have a workplace pension, so they’ll be investing every month without even realising it, and probably have six figures, maybe multiple six figures, in a workplace pension, and they don’t realise that till they’re 50 or 60. But if you can then put away an extra hundred quid a month, even if you compound that over 30 or 40 years… compounding calculations aren’t always the best, because they’re quite static, there are assumptions, it’s £100 a month for 40 years, and that might change if you buy a house, have a kid, your salary might go up. But plugging the numbers in is useful, and you can see that even on £100 a month, over 30 or 40 years at a 7% rate of return, the average return of the global stock market, you’re still going to have six figures in that one pot. If that’s in a stocks and shares ISA, it’s completely tax-free to withdraw. And that’ll make your life better, you’ve beaten inflation, you’ve grown your wealth, and you’re going to make your future life more comfortable. I always get messages from people, obviously I’m in my 20s, so most of my audience, I guess, is people in their 20s and 30s who can be more aggressive, but people still message me who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, saying, I’m a bit older now, is there any point investing? I always say 100%, because even though, don’t get me wrong, the biggest thing you have is compound interest and time, and if you have less time on your side, your money’s in the market for fewer years, so you have less advantage of compounding, but you can still build up a pot, and even a smaller pot can make your retirement more comfortable, or you can pass it on to kids and grandkids. So there are only benefits to investing, particularly if you’re spending money on stuff you don’t need every month, or if you’re just saving aimlessly with no real purpose. If you’re saving money, and this is where I often speak to people, and it’s the biggest way to change their mindset, if you’re just saving money for the sake of it, not for a holiday, not for a house, that’s great that you’re doing that, but rather than diverting that money into a Monzo savings pot, just divert it into a stocks and shares ISA, because you don’t need it for years anyway, ten-plus years, you might as well do that. And it is quite hard in the early years, and this is a bit of a tangent, because your contributions are going to make up the bulk of your portfolio. It took me about seven and a bit years to get to 100k, and of that, £76,000 was my own contributions. I had some employer match pensions, some Lifetime ISA government contributions, there were some other bits going on, but the large bulk of it was my own money, just from my nine-to-five, that I invested. It’s not really sexy to talk about, because all the compound interest calculations online are like, be a millionaire off £100. But realistically, even now, I think I’ve got about 180k, about 120k of that is still my own contribution. So I’ve had gains, 60k of gains, which is amazing, but my contributions still massively dwarf what I’ve actually gained. Of course, that’s only going to diverge over time. I think it’s important for people to realise that even if you’re starting small, I started with £100 a month, don’t be disheartened, because your contributions are going to dominate probably for the first decade, unless you have some amazing stock picks. So I’d say definitely get started with a small amount and don’t be disheartened, you’ve got to keep doing it. And if you are saving for the sake of it, just try investing that money instead, and you’re probably going to end up much better off.

[24:05] Sammie: You’re so right, because if you put £100 a month in, that’s £1,200 a year. If you’ve got, let’s say, as an example, 10%, I’m not saying you’re going to get 10%, I’m just keeping it simple because it’s much easier to do, okay, please don’t come at me for these figures, it’s crazy, people are writing articles about this stuff now, if you say over 8% you get really picked apart for it, it’s crazy. But look, 10% is the number, right, 10% on that is £120, but 10% on £180k is £18,000.

[24:38] Ryan: Yeah.

[24:38] Sammie: So at the beginning it feels like, oh, what’s the point, I’ve only made £120. Like, oh, I’ve probably made £120 with an extra day’s work. But that’s where it’s starting, right, you need that beginning point to get the wheel moving. Because when we first met in 2024, we both had an absolute storming year, and then we had another storming year in 2025 where it went up even more, and I think my portfolio was up 31% in 2025, which is mental, that’s not the 10%, that’s 31%, and on that number, it’s managed to grow my net worth by a considerable amount, more than an average UK salary at this point, but it’s taken me ten years to get to that point. That’s why they say the first hundred k invested is the most important, because it makes such a tangible difference to your life at that point. You can actually start supplementing portions of your life if you really want to. But the best thing to do, as we know, is try not to touch it as much as possible.

[25:47] Ryan: Yeah, I mean, the thing is as well, with the stock market… when you talk about the stock market broadly, it’s quite hard, because there are different stock markets, different time periods, different currencies. But generally speaking, when it comes to the broad stock market, in any given calendar year, it goes up 75% of the time. So from 1st January to 31st December, three-quarters of the time the market goes up. The problem is… there were some good years, other than 2022, I lost a load of money, most of my money is just in global funds, but the last five years the stock market’s been on a great run. Because the market goes up in any given year, you don’t really hear about it. You hear about the tariff dip in 2025 when it fell by 25%, the COVID crash when it dropped 34%, when there were record-high interest rates and inflation in 2022. You hear about all those dips and crashes. But then we zoom out, and as we like to say, if in doubt, zoom out, and you look over five years, all those end-of-the-world events and massive bits of drama are just irrelevant. I think that’s just why, whatever else you can say, by getting started even on a small amount and doing it consistently, the only regret you’re going to have is that you didn’t start sooner and didn’t invest more. As you mentioned, the first 100k is the hardest, and I’d even take it a step back and say the first 1k at the start is the hardest, particularly if you’re only investing £100 a month or even less. I started with £100 a month back in 2017, 2018. It does feel like, what’s the point, it’s taking nearly a year to get to a thousand pounds, then the market dips a bit and you lose a bit of money, and it’s easy for you to save or spend that money instead. But in that first thousand-pound process, you’re going to make loads of mistakes, I made loads, I didn’t use an ISA, I didn’t invest on an investment platform, I used a bank, I was paying high fees, I was trying to trade stocks, but you almost need to get to that first k just to learn those mistakes. Then it’s probably when you get to 10k, and there’s a good year, and you’re like, wow. I think it happened to me quite early on, maybe my second or third year, after three years of investing I’d got to about 10 or 15k, and my portfolio was up about two or three k that year, because the global stock market had a really good year, and I was like, wow, that’s quite a lot of money, I never would have got that in a savings account. Then, as you say, you get to 100k, and all of a sudden there’s one really good year, and you’ve earned the average UK salary, and it’s mental. It’s bizarre, because that’s happened to me a couple of times now, but I don’t really feel any different, I’m not going to access that money for decades, so I’ll make a post about it.

[28:12] Sammie: Driving a Lambo now, right?

[28:14] Ryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was 2024, my gains were like £30,000, it was mental, that was just below the average UK salary. My lifestyle didn’t change, I was still working as an accountant, I was still leaving that money invested. But when you see that, it’s like, okay, you need to get to those larger amounts. But it wouldn’t have started had I not put in that hundred quid all those years ago. I think another thing is because we’ve now got larger portfolios, and maybe it’s not as associated with people just starting, but we all started from that small amount. We didn’t start with any inheritance or special genius or anything, so just getting started small is the most important thing, and then you can take it from there. And if it takes you a year to get to 100k, or 20 years, or longer, it doesn’t matter, it’s beside the point. It’s just that you’re actually investing, you’re actually building towards your retirement, you’re actually beating inflation, and ultimately, what’s the point of investing except to try and retire better or retire earlier, and you cannot do that without investing your money, that’s the bottom line.

[29:17] Sammie: Yeah, yeah. I love that you said that, and I just want to reiterate this point, if you can only afford £10, you value £10 completely differently to someone who values a thousand pounds, right, and there’s no wrong or right with that, it just needs to be said, because you see these numbers online, £250 or £500 invested over here, and I see some videos now like, budget my £11,000 salary, and I’m like, mate, come on. It’s fun to watch, because it’s a lot of money, but for the everyday person, it’s literally five times less than that. So I think you shouldn’t judge around the amount, judge your own life, what you can do in front of you, and if it’s only a tenner, it’s going to make a difference, so just start getting it to work, and that’s totally fine. I want to touch on this, because we spoke about this off camera, different seasons of life mean you invest different amounts. So the compound interest calculator says £100 a month for X, Y and Z over 30 years, but I’ve just moved house, I was putting four or five hundred, up to seven hundred pounds, in, I’ve done videos about a thousand pounds invested before, and for the last four or five months, while I’ve been doing up and moving into a new house, it’s cost me a lot more than I thought it would, and that money’s had to be moved away from going into my investment pots. I still invested some small amounts to keep the wheel moving, but it’s a different season of life for me. If you have a baby, it’s going to cost you way more money buying all the things and keeping that human alive during that period of time, so it might not mean you can’t put three or four hundred quid in there anymore, you might only be able to do £50. Do you think it’s really important that people don’t just stop, and instead always try to edge it forward, even if it’s a small amount?

[31:07] Ryan: Yeah, definitely. I think you make a good point that your investing contributions won’t be the same and won’t go up linearly over time. Compounding calculations are great, but they’re very static, it’s like £100 a month for 30 years or £1,000 a month for X years, whereas in reality, you’re probably going to buy a house, you might have a kid, you might get married, you might move abroad, you might start a business, you might have an unexpected expense. So what I say to people is just afford what you can each month, and if there are some months or some years, or as you put it, some seasons where you can’t invest, that’s completely fine. If you can keep the wheels moving a little bit, as you mentioned, say you were doing £400 a month for argument’s sake, and you’re now having a baby and moving house, if you can still do £50 a month, it’s only going to benefit you and compound. But if you have to completely stop, that’s completely fine too. I think that’s one downside of the compounding calculators, you just assume it’s always going to be the same amount, or that your salary is going to go up over time, it might not, if you change career. Actually, for me, my salary steadily went up as I qualified as a chartered accountant, I got a massive pay jump, and as I kept getting promoted at work over the years and progressed in my career… but since stopping working as a chartered accountant, my income’s been much more uncertain, much more volatile now, I’m working for myself. This year is probably going to be the least I invest, probably since 2019 or 2020, one of the early years of investing, just because I’d rather have a larger emergency fund and more cash in the business rather than invest it. And that’s completely fine, because, as you mentioned, it isn’t necessarily going to be up and down in a straight line. But to counter-argue my own point a little, I think if you’re younger and you haven’t got responsibilities, like for me, I’ve got no kids, I’m not married, I’ve always rented, I’ve been renting for ten years now, through uni and then in London and now in Melbourne, so I’ve never had massive financial responsibilities pinning me down. So I’ve always prioritised investing. Similar to you, I got to the point where I was doing about a thousand pounds a month towards the end of my career, I’d like to go back to being a chartered accountant at some point, but the numbers… it becomes a little out of touch. All my portfolio updates are still on Instagram, and I was investing £100 a month when my portfolio was five grand, then I was investing a thousand pounds a month and my portfolio was 150 grand, now 180. So it is a bit more out of touch, but I did prioritise it, and I guess I used my lack of financial responsibilities. I’ll still enjoy my life, don’t get me wrong, I’m making it sound like I was a hermit eating rice and beans, I was still having fun, obviously. But if you can balance investing and fun and your responsibilities, regardless of what season you’re in, then you’re only going to benefit. If you’re younger, in your 20s, you’ve got compounding on your side, or your salary’s going to be lower, the more you can get away in your 20s is probably worth quadruple what you can put in in your 40s, just because there’s an extra 20 years of compounding. So there are, once again, two sides of the coin, where your contributions aren’t going to be linear and might pull back a bit, like yours have recently, or like mine have. But if you’re in a season of your life where you’re earning well, where you’re locked in, where you’re focused, if you can invest more, particularly if you’re younger, it’s just going to benefit you massively over the decades.

[34:30] Sammie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting, a friend of mine is in his late 40s, and they’ve just moved house, and he’s been investing since his mid-20s, he’s built up a really decent portfolio. Not investing thousands of pounds a month, he’s doing, say, four or five hundred quid a month, for example. He’s done really, really well, and his portfolio is decent, and he decided to use some of it, and this is a cardinal sin.

[35:01] Ryan: Cardinal sin, can’t do that.

[35:04] Sammie: For us, we’re now in the accumulation phase. For him, he got to a point where he was like, no, I’d like to change my life at this point. He didn’t take it all out, he took a chunk out and redid his kitchen and built an extension, and he can live in that environment now. He was talking to me about it, and we went for dinner the other week, and my first reaction was, are you mad? But then as he explained it to me, it made a lot of sense, because he said, well, I’m now going to live in this house for the next 15-odd years, this kitchen I go into every single day, I’ve literally paid for it from my investment gains, I still have a sizeable investment portfolio, I’ve still got sizeable gains on that investment portfolio, I still haven’t used all of it. And yes, I’ve maybe knocked myself off the compounding wheel a touch, but my life’s changed. I just really love that, and I think it’s such an important thing to say, that money, if it’s in a stocks and shares ISA, can end up being used for something, it’s not just a 30- or 40-year thing. If something’s going to actually really change your life now, you can go and get the money and use it, right?

[36:21] Ryan: Yeah, definitely, and that’s really the beauty of having a stocks and shares ISA. Most people will probably have a workplace pension, or you’ll be auto-enrolled into one, and if you’re self-employed or a limited company director, hopefully you’ve got a SIPP, so you’re secure in your long-term future. If you can then have a stocks and shares ISA on the side, a two-pronged approach, I think that’s best, because pensions and ISAs have different pros and cons, but the more options, the better. It can actually make your future drawdown strategy more tax efficient, and it means if the government come in and hit pensions, you’ve got an ISA to fall back on, and vice versa, hopefully they don’t destroy both. The beauty of an ISA is it’s completely flexible. Most people will talk about using it to retire earlier than pension age, their stocks and shares ISA will tip them over, but if you do need the money for something, you can use it, and it’s tax-free in an ISA and it’s accessible. I think there’s a really good book on that. I myself have never actually accessed any of the money I’ve invested. As I mentioned, I’ve invested about 120k in total, and that includes employer contributions and stuff, it’s not all my own cash, and you’ve got to make use of that free money. But of that, I’ve never touched any of my gains, I’ve left them all invested. I read a really good book called Die with Zero, which is quite popular now, I read that maybe two years ago, and it opened my eyes a bit, because I started thinking the whole point of investing is to actually use this money and enjoy your life. That’s probably the dark side of investing and the financial independence movement, when people squirrel away every penny for decades, never enjoy their money, and then die with millions of pounds, whereas they could have used some of the money, paid for a family holiday, treated themselves to a new kitchen like your mate, whatever is actually going to improve their life. It’s really hard, because it’s so nuanced and specific to people and their preferences. But if you can find that balance between investing for the future and having fun today, and knowing when you want to access your money to maximise your current joy, like your mate did with his kitchen, that’s the beauty of investing as well. Ultimately, if you’re growing your money, if you’re investing, you’re giving yourself more options, and that’s just why you need to invest, and the beauty of it all. Right now I’ve got gains in my stocks and shares ISA in the multiple five figures, so if I wanted to I could take out 5k and go to the World Cup, I’m not going to, but that’s the beauty of it. When I started that stocks and shares ISA in 2018 with £100 a month, I never would have imagined it’s now like 50 or 60k. But you’ve just got to get started, as we said. The beauty of it is that type of account is accessible, and I think having an ISA and a pension working together, growing for the long term, is the best way to go about it, as part of people’s own investment strategy.

[39:28] Sammie: So we’ve sort of brushed over it a couple of times, mentioned global funds, etc. Can we just give the full rundown on what that means for somebody, and why you only do a global index fund strategy?

[39:40] Ryan: Yeah, so to be very transparent, I’ve got about 180k invested, it fluctuates, of course. 90% of that is in various global index funds and ETFs, and the other 10% is in crypto, mainly Bitcoin, which is obviously a much higher-risk investment. But to come back to the investing blueprint, which I talked about last time I was on the podcast, and I go through in my book and in a lot of my content on social media, there are three steps to invest, and we’ve touched on the first two already. Step one is choosing a platform, there are so many good ones in the UK, and the best one really depends on your specific situation, but to give a few examples: Trading 212, InvestEngine, Lightyear, Vanguard, Hargreaves Lansdown, those are five popular ones. Step two is your actual account, and the best type of account for most people is going to be a stocks and shares ISA or a pension, either a workplace pension or a SIPP, probably having both, I’ve actually got all three. My thought process was, well, when I was working, I wanted the workplace pension to get the employer match, I wanted the SIPP to make limited company contributions into, and I wanted the stocks and shares ISA to invest more and get that flexibility of being able to access the money earlier. So you’ve got the platform, then you’ve got the account or tax wrapper on the platform, and then you put an actual investment inside that account, on whatever platform you’re using. The actual investment… this is quite a common misconception I hear people say, it’s like, oh, my ISA’s terrible, or my pension’s great, but the pension or the ISA isn’t actually growing your money, it’s whatever’s inside it, whatever the money is invested into, inside your ISA and your pension, that’s actually growing your money and growing your wealth. For me, I only have one investment in each of the accounts I mentioned, which are my most important investment accounts, and each one is a low-cost global fund. I’ve been doing that since 2018. When I first started investing, in my first year, 2017, I made loads of mistakes, read dozens of books, done it all. Then, since 2018, I’ve settled on global funds, always invested into them, always will. I’ve actually seen a bit of a trend now of everyone using global funds, because a lot of people used to prefer S&P 500 funds or US funds, but I’ve always stuck to global. The reason ultimately is I just think it’s impossible to beat the market. I actually tried myself when I started investing, which is where you pick stocks to try and outperform the global stock market, I tried that, I failed miserably, lost money, paid high fees. So I thought, okay, I can’t beat the market, so I’ll use an index fund. An index fund or an ETF, they’re essentially the same thing, they just track the market. The difficulty is then it’s like, okay, I don’t want to invest in Apple or Tesco and try and read the financial report and time it and predict what’s going to happen, it’s impossible, so many companies fail. So it’s like, okay, I’ll use a fund. It then gets even more difficult, because at least you know what Apple does, or what Nike does, or JD, but when you have funds, the names are mental, and there are thousands of them, so it’s like, okay, which one do you invest into? You’ve got the FTSE 100, that tracks the UK stock market, the largest 100 companies, and of course everyone’s heard of the S&P 500, the largest 500 US companies. There’s the NASDAQ 100, the largest 100 tech companies essentially in America, and every country has its own index, Japan’s got its own, the Nikkei 225, there are so many to choose from. My thought process was, I just don’t know which country is going to perform the best, so I’d rather invest into them all. The reason why, and I did a lot of reading and research back in my early years of investing, but even to this day, is that the global stock market is constantly changing. The best example to illustrate this is Japan. Japan in 1989 was 45% of the global stock market, it was the biggest and best market, all the tech companies, the car companies, engineering, manufacturers, everything. It then didn’t produce a return for 28 years, and it was the best stock market in the 80s. So had you put all your money into Japan… the market was still ebbing and flowing, but it didn’t actually break even again for 28 years, and that’s why I just think, to this day…

[43:51] Sammie: Yeah.

[43:51] Ryan: Yeah, and in reality, people are going to invest monthly, so it’s not the best example, but I think it just shows that betting on one country is risky, even if it’s the best country, like the US has been. Now, the US could still be the best, it’s 62% of the global stock market, it could keep dominating, who knows, but I’d rather be globally diversified and not bet on one government, one currency, one set of rules, one country. So I’ve always been a fan of global funds. To be transparent, that has meant I’ve missed out on gains in my early years of investing, because when I started in 2017 and really up until 2024, US funds outperformed global funds, and so did Bitcoin. If I’d put all my money in the S&P 500, I’d have had more money than my global funds. I can go into the specifics, but it’s more that when I’m investing for 30 years, I can’t predict what’s going to happen, I can’t time the market, I don’t know when to get in and out of stocks or countries, so I’d rather just own them all. The beauty of it is the global fund will self-cleanse over time, so if the US starts performing poorly, like it did relatively speaking in 2025, then more and more other countries are going to make up more of the global fund. So right now I’ve got about 60% of my money in the US, I’m still heavily weighted to US stocks, but it’s also 40% in international stocks, the UK, China, India, they’re all relatively small parts, to be transparent, two or three percent. The second biggest country is Japan, which is about six or seven percent, still tiny, dwarfed by the US. But I’d rather invest globally, because it means I’m globally diversified, it also takes all the thinking out of it, I can just chuck money into a global fund every month and watch my wealth grow over time as the global stock market hopefully continues to go up. So yeah, that’s ultimately why I use global funds, because I don’t think I can beat the market and I can’t predict which country is going to perform best, so I just own thousands of stocks in one global fund.

[45:56] Sammie: You mentioned the names, there’s a couple of things I want to unpack with that, because the names are mental, man, and they throw everybody off.

[46:03] Ryan: I think it’s one of the biggest barriers to entry, when you click into a name it’s like some absolute Harry Potter spell, you’re like, what does that mean, click off, go back to TikTok, what does that mean?

[46:12] Sammie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A great way is just asking ChatGPT or Claude, what does this actually mean, because it can explain that name to you like you’re five. Is this the right one, I’m looking for a globally diversified fund with low fees, can you help me find a few, and then search whether or not they’re on your platform, because that’s the other thing, each platform has different ones, they’re called different things, and it can start to get away from you. So a touch of research is required at that point, because it’s a big decision, especially if it’s something you’re going to be investing into for a few years. But AI can really help, and the platforms often have some decent tools on there to help guide you as well. But it is a big decision. When you also mentioned there’s like 62% US and 7% Japan and stuff like that, so if I’m adding £100 into my global index fund, is £62 then going into the US? Is that what you would say to someone?

[47:17] Ryan: Yeah, that’s what I’d say. By using the global fund, particularly in recent years, it’s still going to be dominated by US companies, so most of your money is still going to enter the US stock market. But if over the next 30 years the US underperforms relative to, any other country, it looks most likely to be like China, maybe India, one of the emerging markets, but if it did underperform, then that country would make up more and more of the global fund. If you actually look at the stock market over the last 120 years, the UK used to dominate at about 25%, now it’s down to about 3%. The US has been as low as 15 and as high as 70, it’s always made up a big chunk of it, but it’s been as low as 15% at some points. As I mentioned, Japan was up to 45%, now it’s down to six. If you just don’t know what’s going to happen… I obviously love this stuff, but I still have no idea which country is going to perform the best over my lifetime, so I’d rather just own them all. It does mean if the US keeps dominating, more and more money will go there, but if another country starts doing better than the US, that’ll make up more of the global fund and more of my money will be allocated there. It’s one of those things that’s not very sexy, it’s not going to make you rich overnight, but by doing that consistently, putting your money away, compounding it, hopefully at six, seven, eight percent over the long term… once again, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t sound like much, but doing that for years, you take all the guesswork out of it, the global fund is low fee and rebalances, and you can actually focus on increasing your income and putting more into your investments, having fun, rather than living in spreadsheets and researching stocks the whole time, a lot of which probably won’t amount to much, because it’s so difficult. To be honest with you, I feel there’s a bit of an aspect of learn-by-failing with investing. I’ve talked about my mistakes investing for years online, but I feel like you just need to… even in the book there’s a game about trying to time the market and pick stocks, it’s just so difficult. So just have a go, with your real money or with fake paper money on a trading account, and you’ll probably quite quickly work out that an index fund is probably the best way to invest, because it’s passive, it’s low fee, it’s simple.

[49:29] Sammie: And if you don’t want to, I’m Warren Buffett, man.

[49:35] Ryan: And then if you don’t want to predict which country, if you don’t have multiple of them, you don’t know which is going to be the best, just use a global one. I think the problem is all the biggest investors are in the US, the legends, and a lot of the social media content we see is from US people, so it’s always banging on about the S&P 500, which once again is low fee and gives great returns, but you’re still betting on 500 companies in one country. I’d just personally prefer to be globally diversified and have thousands of companies in every corner of the world, just in case. It’s almost like an insurance policy, if the S&P dominates, I’m still going to do well, not as well as had I just used an S&P fund, but it also means if the US does falter, like it did relatively speaking in 2025, I’ve got other countries to make up the shortfall.

[50:18] Sammie: So here’s another question we get a lot, and I know you have a great answer around this. Let’s say I’m putting £100 a month in, why would I not just buy a global fund with £50 and an S&P 500 fund with the other £50?

[50:30] Ryan: Yeah, I feel like… I’ve had that question so many times over the years as well. I think that’s a case of people knowing a global fund’s probably better for them, but thinking the US fund’s going to actually perform better, so they want a bit of both. You can do that if that suits you. With investing, and I probably should have said this earlier, the most important thing is that you’re comfortable with your approach and you actually stick to it. I heard a great story about a bloke called Neil Invests who came onto my podcast, and he spoke to someone who only invested into UK dividend-paying stocks. He said, had he tracked the S&P or the global fund, he’d have been bored out of his mind and sold all the money and spent it decades ago, but because he was doing this strategy, he’s actually underperformed the market, and he admits it, but he’s got more money than had he otherwise spent or saved it. So there’s definitely an element of needing to be comfortable with your approach and actually stick to it. A way to get around that is by using the core-satellite approach, which we can come on to. But the biggest issue with splitting global and US funds is you’re going to be overweight US stocks. In a global fund it’s about 62% US stocks, depending on the specific global fund, and a US fund is going to be 100% US stocks, so by using both, you’re doubling up and you’re actually about 82% US stocks. That’s not necessarily right or wrong, good or bad, it’s just often unintentional and accidental. So when the US market does badly, you’re more negatively impacted than if you’d just used a global fund. On the other side, there’s potential for better returns, if you have more money in specific stocks or countries, you might perform better. But it comes back to, do you think you can beat the market, can you actually predict what’s going to happen? When I truly ask people that, they normally just admit they’re guessing and hoping, or they say, I’m 100% guessing, no idea. Then when the ETF or the stock goes down, you think, I’ll wait till it breaks even. I think the beauty of the global approach is you just funnel money in and you don’t care whether the market’s up or down. If it’s down, you’re getting it cheaper, more gains, if it’s higher, you’re making more money, you’re wealthier on paper, it’s great. Because it’s easy to understand, you just funnel money in. That’s why I mentioned the core-satellite approach, I actually released a YouTube video the other day on the problems with global funds, and the biggest problem, by a mile, is that it’s boring. If you are interested in investing and researching companies and feel like you should do more, a global fund might bore you. So the core-satellite approach, which has been a term coined the last couple of years, and is quite popular, normally it’s 80-20, but you can change those percentages, most of your money is in the core, a global ETF, for example, 80%, and the other 20% you’ve got a bit of Bitcoin, a gold ETF, some Tesla, a US fund, you’re just having some fun. You’ll almost certainly find that underperforms the global ETF, but that’s why you keep the core as big as possible, because you’re scratching that itch without destroying your future financial plan, essentially.

[53:51] Sammie: Well, I’d say within that 20%, because we teach the 80-20, that’s a big part of what I love talking about, because I do feel like some people are totally fine with, okay, I’ve set it up, automate it, and I literally never want to look at it again, I’m happy going about my business.

[54:07] Ryan: That’s sort of what I do, to be honest.

[54:09] Sammie: Yeah, but other people, like myself, are like, no, I’ve really loved that company, and I think I’m right, I’ve done the research and I think I’m right, so I’m going to give it a go, but I’m not going to put 50% of my money into it, I’m going to put like 2% of my money into it, because it’s a bit of a gamble, essentially, because I could be wrong, and I have been wrong multiple times, but I’ve also been right a few times, and the ones I’ve been really right on, I’ve been really, really right on. Some have just gone up 30 or 40% and are still there now, and I won’t get rid of them, because I still think I’m right. But I could also be wrong, and it could come flying back down, or have a really bad year, or a new technology comes out and blows it out of the water, right? But I stay in my lane, so I stay in fintech and e-commerce, which I deeply understand, and if you don’t understand fintech and e-commerce, don’t invest in companies in it, because you don’t have a leg up in that field. If you’re working in EV, electric vehicles, or you work for Tesla and build the cars, you know way more about electric vehicles than anybody else, so that’s probably a really good place for you to invest, if you understand the companies in that area more than anything else. So I always say that, you don’t have to do this, you can just do the global index fund approach, but if you do want to, the 80-20 is a much better balance.

[55:39] Ryan: Yeah, I think so. Peter Lynch, one of the really famous US investors, talked about this for years in his books, that if you’re even a consumer, or you work in an industry, you have such inside information about which company… if you work at a fast food restaurant and there are ten franchises, and next year there’s going to be a hundred, you know the company’s doing well, so you can invest in the stock if it’s public. Actually, interestingly, I read a really interesting article. What I’ve been trying to get across is that it’s impossible to predict the market and what’s going to happen, and it’s also impossible to time it, which is why having all, or at least the bulk, and it hasn’t necessarily got to be a global fund, but diversified index funds and ETFs, even if the 80% core is a bit global, a bit S&P, a bit UK, it’s still fine. But having the core in index funds and ETFs is the way to go, at least. I was reading an article about a guy who had all the headlines from COVID, from 2019 to 2020, 2021, 2022, and he said, if I had perfect future information, I knew exactly what was going to happen based on the headlines, this is when I would buy and sell. What he did was he essentially sold just before the pandemic, and then bought as the vaccine was announced, and he essentially missed out on a 21% gain, because even with perfect information about knowing what’s going to happen in the future, it’s still just impossible to predict how the market is going to react and what’s going to happen in the stock market. I’ve probably butchered that story a little bit, but what I’m trying to get across is that even if you know perfectly what’s going to happen with the headlines, your inside information, you never know how it’s going to play out. Once again, that’s just the beauty of keeping all of your money, or a lot of it, in these low-cost index funds. I’m particularly a fan of global funds, and I appreciate I’ve said global funds, global index funds, global ETFs quite a lot. My three favourite ones at the moment, and this is an evolving space because fees are coming down, which is great for us as investors, not financial advice of course: the FTSE Global All Cap, and I invest into all of these myself. The FTSE Global All Cap is the most diversified, but it’s also the highest fee, at 0.23%, and unfortunately it isn’t available on that many platforms. My second favourite one, and probably the best low-cost global ETF right now, is ACWI from State Street, that’s 0.12% and has around 2,200 stocks. My third favourite is VWRP, Vanguard FTSE All-World, the biggest, most popular global fund, 3,700 stocks. They’ve actually recently decreased their fees from 0.22% to 0.19% to be a bit more competitive. To be honest, what I say to people is a lot of people procrastinate on this, so regardless of what platform, just pick any platform. Whatever you’ve seen advertised on the tube, whatever your mate uses. I’d say to people, when they’re really struggling to start, invest a trivial amount, I’m talking less than the price of a pint, five pounds, pick any platform, don’t even look at the fees, any platform you know, just open an account, put in five pounds, put it into a global ETF, and then at least the ball’s rolling, and everything will flow from there. You can then research what platform’s best, or which global fund’s best. I spoke to a woman in 2021, told her exactly what to do, she didn’t invest, and she messaged me at the end of 2025, and I said, I’d really hate to break it to you, but in those four or five years your money would be up like 65 or 70 percent, please just start, put £10 in. Once you’ve got the app on your phone, you’ll check it more, you’re more likely to invest, you’re more likely to research. But taking that first step is the most important thing. We’re talking a bit more about technicalities, different accounts and tax wrappers, different global funds and what they invest into, their fees, but just getting started, and you can always then watch more YouTube videos, read a book, and the rest can flow from there. Just wait and start investing, exactly, that’s the most important thing.

[59:43] Sammie: So it’s too true. But mate, I’d love… honestly, I know we didn’t get through most of the process that I had for us to speak about, but I hope it’s valuable for people. Honestly, where do you want to send people? Is it the book?

[60:01] Ryan: Yeah, if you’re looking for a book to read, Stop, Wait and Start Investing, it came out in 2024, everything in there is still applicable, and it talks through that three-step blueprint of choosing a platform, choosing an account, and then choosing an investment. The other thing I’d say, I’ve actually recently created a free guide and a free course, so if you go to makingmoneysimple.co.uk/get-started, it took me a few weeks to put together, but it’s like a 30-day course. Just do that, and there’s not as much nuance as if I were speaking to people one-on-one, but it covers everything you need to know, and a bit from choosing the platform, choosing funds, examples, fees. There’s so much, obviously, once you start investing it’s one of those things where it’s so simple to get started, but then once you start digging, there are so many questions that come up, which I think is why people struggle to get started, and why I say just invest that trivial amount. But the course is a bit more all-encompassing and goes through a lot of common questions.

[61:04] Sammie: So, yeah, if you want to link that up, we’ll link that out for people. Oh, yeah, I can’t.

[61:08] Ryan: We’ll link the book, but if not, the course is free and you can just have it in your email, and it’s quite easy.

[61:14] Sammie: Is the course audio as well, or is it all in text on email?

[61:19] Ryan: It’s sort of collating common questions, and it links out to some other resources that I use, like the pension tracing thing you mentioned, compound interest calculators. I’ve also done it for the first time last year, and because the video did well, I’m now going to make it a yearly thing, ranking all the best global ETFs, so I’ve got a YouTube video on that, it goes through that and ranks them all. There’s so much, just go through it all. Ultimately, just start investing, that’s the most important thing, get yourself started, you heard it.

[61:48] Sammie: That’s it, honestly, mate, thank you so much, and I look forward to drinking many pints as Arsenal win the league this year.

[61:55] Ryan: Yeah, we’ll get again soon, Sammie, cheers for having me on, man.