Be Excellent To Each Other

I have a modest five-figure sum in savings that I intend to use as a deposit for my own home, however recent potential job-related circumstances mean that I may end up moving somewhere else and thus this will be on hold again for a while.

I've thought about using a little of it (lets say, £2500) in the meantime to dabble in a bit of long-term investing, but is there a good place to start for your average layman?

Rather than mucking about in stocks and share (which really only pay out over looong term) have you investigated schemes within your own bank/building society? I've put in for a couple of 1 year/2 year fixed term bonds before now.

I'd say not really. At that level you can't afford to pay for financial advice without eating into your capital and if you deal on your own, you're as likely to piss it away as make any money.

A stocks and shares ISA may be your best bet for a combination of modest growth potential with medium risk.

Hmm, that does sound pretty good! Will investigate.

£2500 spread over FTSE 100 about 3 years ago would have be worth about £4500 by now.

</logic boy>

Theres only about a million. Your bank (or other banks) will be worth a chat.

However, you probably should wait until April, as they are all SELL SELL SELL now for the end of tax year. You won't get much attention and time to chat.

Let us know if you find anything, eh? I'm not too bothered if there's only a modest return, but have thought about putting my spare money somewhere so someone can make us of it instead of having it sit around doing nothing until I get bored and splurge it on something stupid.

I opened my first ISA this week.

I now kind of need some money back to pay for a lot of bills that have suddenly appeared.

You could do a lot worse than getting a copy of this first and reading it cover to cover...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Motley-Fool-UK- ... 450&sr=1-1

While we're, sort of, on the subject here. I have some stock options....god knows what to do with them? The're Canadian based and I should probably exercise them before my company is worthless. I need a broker to buy them for me I think as it's not a straight swap for cash as I'm not in North America. Can I ask my bank to act as my broker? How do these things work? Any ideas?

Is this a SAYE scheme? I have one at my company, and I sold the shares through the company who ran the scheme.

Well it's Canadian so I don't think so... unless it's covered by some regulations... but again not sure how this works when the company is based in another country. I've read the documents and all it says is that peps outside of teh US and Canada must buy the options and then do what ever they want with them after. If I was in the US I could just swap them for the profits.... there not really worth much and I'm wondering if after exchanging them with exchange rates and broker costs and also possible tax if the're actually worth anything.

Just read up on SAYE and it's not that.