That's it. That's the post.
Okay, not really. But that's the spirit of what I want this blog to be — the boring truth that the loud half of finance content won't admit, because it doesn't sell courses and it doesn't get clicks.
How I started investing at 18
A bit of context. I'm 28. I started working at 17 — I didn't do particularly well at school, and I came out of it determined to make up for that. An apprenticeship was the first thing I took on. About a year in, when I was 18 and earning my own money for the first time, I started putting some of it into investing. I haven't stopped since.
I live in Edinburgh — I bought my place when I was 26 and I'm still very much paying the mortgage. I earn above the UK average. By the trajectory I've been on for ten years now, I should be able to retire about a decade earlier than the state pension age. Ideally before that. I'm not promising anything — markets do what markets do — but the trajectory's there because I made the habit early and kept it. The whole reason I ended up building WealthR was so I'd have somewhere honest to look at the chart and check I was still on the line.
How we bought a house using LISAs
On the deposit, since that's the obvious next question when anyone hears "26 with a mortgage": my partner and I both opened LISAs as soon as we could and maxed them out for four or five years straight. £4k each per tax year, plus the 25% government bonus on top of every contribution. Two of those running in parallel is how we got there.
The other piece of honesty here is that we could only max them like that because our parents gave us the runway to live at home for a stretch of those years. I paid a grand total of £200 a month in digs, and at the time I genuinely thought I was getting ripped off. Sat here now, two years into a mortgage, I can tell you with absolute clarity how spectacularly wrong I was. Every quid of rent-not-paid is real money that gets to compound instead — at £200 a month I was the luckiest I'll probably ever be in housing. We treat it as a genuine blessing now. Not everyone gets that head start, and nothing on this blog is going to pretend the maths works the same without it.
The detail that matters for the rest of the post is the bit underneath all of that — doing the deposit through LISAs meant I didn't have to liquidate the MoneyBox account or touch the Trading 212 stack to put it together. The boring long-term compounding kept going the whole way through.
The mistakes (yes, including Planetpalz)
I'm not telling you this to flex. I'm telling you because the only reason I can say it with a straight face is that I started early, made several genuinely stupid mistakes, and then mostly just kept going. Time did the heavy lifting.
The mistakes, for the record, so you can have a laugh at them and learn a tiny bit from each one:
- A pile of money in high-risk oil and gas discovery shares, on the basis that I thought I'd spotted something the market hadn't. (Reader, I had not.)
- Too many altcoins during the period that "too many altcoins" was an extremely common sentence among people my age.
- A bag of ETF tokens called Planetpalz — yes, that was the actual name — which I held with the patient confidence of someone waiting for gold to be minted from rock. The minting, somehow, did not happen. They are now worth approximately nothing. In hindsight, almost certainly a scam — and one I probably should have clocked from the name alone.
The boring habit that quietly saved me
The thing that quietly saved me through all of that — and the reason "quietly" ended up in the name of this blog — was opening a MoneyBox account when they first came out and using it the boring way: weekly contributions into an S&P 500 tracker, an emerging markets sleeve, a few of their managed portfolios. I still add every week, I've never taken money out, and the stack is up around 50%. Not because I was clever. Because diversification you forget about for a decade tends to do that.
The other thing that happened, mostly by accident, is that I bought a small slice of MoneyBox the company itself in their first crowdfunding round. £333. I liked the app, I clicked invest, that was the entire thesis. That slice is now worth a bit over £1k. I'd be lying if I told you that came from a careful valuation analysis. It didn't. It's a useful reminder that some of my "best" investment decisions were essentially luck, and the consistent-weekly-deposit thing is what's actually built the trajectory.
The MoneyBox fees aren't perfect. I know that now. But they're small in absolute terms and switching out of compounded gains for a fee difference of fractions of a percent is exactly the kind of micro-optimisation that costs people more than the fees ever do. So it stays. That's the boring base of the portfolio.
The more active half lives on Trading 212, which has better fees and is where I take a bit more risk. Growth sectors I have a genuine long-term thesis on — AI, robotics, healthcare — and a defensive slice in insurance because I sleep better with some ballast in there. About 20% of the whole portfolio is in dividend payers, which is the bit I'm most quietly excited about. While I'm still working, every dividend gets reinvested. The maths I'm playing for is that by 55 or 60, the dividend stream is large enough to more or less replace a salary on its own.
Whether the markets cooperate to the day is a different question. The plan just has to be plausible enough that I'm not flying blind.
Starting early matters more than starting big
I'm aware I'm in a relatively comfortable position to write this. The UK cost of living over the last few years has been brutal for a lot of people, including me in smaller ways. I'm not going to be the prick who tells you the answer is to budget harder, or that skipping the morning coffee makes you a millionaire by 40. It won't, and you'd be miserable.
But here's the thing I've come to believe, and it's the reason I'm bothering to write any of this — starting early matters more than starting big. Every year you compound from 22 instead of 32 is a year you can never get back, and the catch-up amount you'd have to save later to land in the same place is far, far more than most people think. The flip side is the encouraging bit: small early actions, kept up boringly for a long time, do more work than they get credit for.
So if you're reading this and you can't yet imagine putting away meaningful sums, this blog is still for you. Maybe especially for you. The knowledge — what an ISA actually is, why a workplace pension and a personal SIPP behave differently, what inflation does to cash sitting in a 1.5% saver, how the long arc of markets has actually behaved — is what you can be stacking right now, when there's not much money to deploy yet. So that the day the money does start coming in (pay rises, second incomes, redundancy payouts, partnership earnings — these days come for most people) you're not starting from zero. You already know what to do with it.
That's the actual edge. Not stock picks. Knowing the rules of the game before you have anything serious riding on them.
What this blog isn't
It isn't financial advice. I'm not regulated, I'm not your adviser, and if you're making a real decision with real money — pension transfer, big lump sum, divorce, inheritance, property — see an actual qualified IFA. Not someone on the internet, including me.
It isn't a stock-picking newsletter. I'll mention what I hold when it's relevant — MoneyBox for the diversified base, Trading 212 for the active half — but that's a window into one person's reasoning, not a recommendation for yours.
It isn't a funnel for a course, a Patreon, or affiliate links. WealthR (the app) is free forever. Optional Pro at £4.99/mo or £39.99/year unlocks the heavier features — the Actual Return forecast, adviser share links, PDF reports, the Tax Year Optimiser. The writing here is free forever too, and I don't take paid placements. I'd rather have ten readers who trust me than ten thousand who don't.
What it is — and who else gets to write here
What it is — a place I'm going to write down what I've actually figured out as a UK investor over the last decade. The stuff I wish someone had written when I was 18 and starting. The bits of tax law and pension nuance that took me years to absorb. The mistakes I made and what they cost me. The reasoning behind the calculators I build into WealthR. The bigger philosophical points about why almost everything in this game comes down to the one variable you can't buy more of: time.
And it isn't going to be only me writing it. Quietly Compounding is open to UK guest contributors — people who actually understand a specialism I can't justifiably cover from where I'm standing. Defined benefit pensions and the public-sector schemes. The tax side of self-employment and limited companies. Property mechanics beyond a first mortgage. Decumulation. Inheritance. The bits of the UK money system I haven't lived through, written by people who have. If you write seriously about UK personal finance and the editorial bar here (no jargon, no advice, no sponsorship, no affiliate links in post bodies) reads like something you'd want to write under, the pitch details are on the blog homepage.
If that sounds slow — good. It's meant to.
A few people whose work made me think differently
If the long-term, low-noise side of UK personal finance interests you, these are the people I'd point a friend toward. No affiliates, no kickbacks. Just writers and YouTubers I've genuinely learned from.
- Monevator — the UK index investing blog. Been running for over a decade and a half. The closest thing the UK has to a written canon for this stuff. Read the archives top to bottom if you ever have a quiet weekend.
- Damien Talks Money — my favourite UK personal finance YouTuber. ISAs, SIPPs, pensions, mortgages, all in plain English, all with the actual maths shown on screen. No hype. No thumbnails of him pointing at words.
- PensionCraft — Ramin Nakisa, ex-UBS. The most rigorous UK YouTube channel on investing and pensions. The opposite of clickbait. You can tell he'd rather be right than viral.
- Morgan Housel — American, not UK, but his writing on long-term thinking and behaviour around money is the best in the world. The Psychology of Money is, I think, the single most useful book you could read in this space. His ongoing essays at Collab Fund are consistently excellent.
- Banker on FIRE — an anonymous UK banker writing his way through to early retirement. Excellent on the practical mechanics that high earners actually face — tax wrappers, sequencing, lifestyle inflation.
I'll add more as I find more. If there's a name you think belongs on that list, the email is on the about page.
Thanks for reading the first one. The next posts will be more specific — wrapper sequencing for UK investors, the maths behind the financial stress test inside WealthR, why I think Coast FIRE is more useful as a planning concept than full FIRE for most people, what the Edinburgh cost-of-living conversation actually looks like inside my own monthly tracking. The list is long.
If you want something more practical to run the numbers on in the meantime, the free UK calculators live on the tools page — CGT allowance, stamp duty (England, Scotland and Wales), pension carry forward, IHT on pensions, Marriage Allowance, the cost of raising a child in the UK, a few others. All free, no signup. I built each one when I needed it myself.
Quietly compounding.
— Liam