[00:00:06] Viktoriia Miracle: Hello. Hello and welcome back to happy time happy money podcast and today we have Oliver. Oliver is studying to be an accountant in the UK has been investing for roughly, couple of years and also a father. Hello and welcome Oliver.

[00:00:24] Oliver Locke: Hello Viktoriia. Thanks for allowing me on your platform.

[00:00:27] Viktoriia Miracle: Absolutely. I'm so happy to talk more about investments and, with the future accountants. So tell us, w I always started interview with, I want to know more about you and we all hungry to know more about you and how you came to investments and want to be accountant.

[00:00:43] Oliver Locke: Yeah, sure. I think the main reason I go into investing is because I wanted to learn more money, because everyone does.

[00:00:51] And so when I left uni, I thought that I'd be able to go into a job that would pay a good amount of money. But here in the UK, that, that really isn't the case. If you want to earn more money, you need to continue to study, which is what. I have started to study to become a chartered accountant.

[00:01:09] But in the meantime, I still wanted to keep myself busy. I wanted to do something and I was initially looking at rental properties actually. So me and my brother were looking up big blocks of flats and complexes and wanting to be the landlord of 20, 30, 40 people and he became disinterested in that.

[00:01:28] But I, I wanted to follow that through more and the only, the only thing that stopped me from doing that was having the money to be able to actually put a deposit down. And so I was looking into ways and how to build that deposit. And what I came across was investing into stocks and chairs so that I could slowly build up a nest egg essentially, and then put that into a rental property.

[00:01:52] And I've been doing that ever since. I've started from a very small amount because I didn't have a huge amount of money. And I've been investing little by little, having a compound at the time and investing into companies, as well as, integrating that with my studies as an accountant, I can read financial statements and I help people along the way as well through my Instagram page.

[00:02:17] That's essentially it.

[00:02:21] Viktoriia Miracle: That is awesome and that's, that's how I found Alvarez has such an awesome and educating, providing insightful Instagram page. So tell me more about like, where people like start, where do you need to start to invest? Like, what is the right time? There is the right amount. There is a right time.

[00:02:43] Oliver Locke: There's, there's never a right time to invest. Regardless of what the market's doing or whether it's just crashed or it's on a bull run for 10, 20 years, there's never a good time or a best time to invest. And the whole idea of time in the market, just, just forget about that. There's really no point in trying to time the market. And the best thing that you can do is to invest small amounts over a long period of time.

[00:03:12] And essentially what that does is lower the risk of losing money in the long-term because you're putting small amounts of money in over time, rather than one big amount of money because obviously if the market was to crash, you would lose it all. But if you were to do over time, even if the market were to crash, you'd be, you'd be buying at that low point.

[00:03:36] And then as it recovers, your average cost would continue to be perfectly fine. And that's where most people are able to not lose money by keeping their efforts go slow.

[00:03:48] Viktoriia Miracle: I love that, you know what, lots of things that I hear, and that was personal to me, I'm like, I don't want to be traded. I don't want to invest because I, what I know the companies like Google, Amazon, Apple things that I really know that I trust, but there's a lot, lots of, lots of companies that you can invest and choose from.

[00:04:06] But a lot of people do not want to see research them. What do you recommend?

[00:04:11] Oliver Locke: Well, the, the there's plenty of companies to invest in. I wouldn't suggest investing in every single one of them because they probably wouldn't be good investments. In fact, actually 90% of people lose money in the stock market, purely because they want to invest in pretty much every company, they hear a hot tip from their friend, or there's a new meme about like GameStop or AMC, or anything in the crypto markets with doge coin or anything like that, they put all of their money in think that they're going to make some quick money.

[00:04:42] And then in a week it's all gone. It's gone. So the, the best thing to do is to pick, exactly what you said to invest in what you know. And so companies like Amazon, Coca-Cola, Google. If, if you know more about the companies that you're invested in. You'll know when something goes wrong or if something's going right.

[00:05:06] Because if you don't know anything about the company and something's going wrong, how are you going to know? How are you going to fix it? You won't be able to. So if you invest in what, you know, you'll be able to understand what's happening with the company. You'll be able to understand how, what's going on in the market will affect that company.

[00:05:28] And you'll know whether it's put more money in or take it out or we'll just leave it.

[00:05:33] Viktoriia Miracle: Absolutely. So how, if there, even though we investing in many companies, like how do we keep process simple?

[00:05:40] Oliver Locke: I think as you're starting off with a small amount of money, you shouldn't invest in many companies at all. When I first started investing, I put in 50 pounds, which is hardly anything.

[00:05:53] I think that's about $30. So it's not a lot of money. So if, if you're investing small amounts, you can pick a company to put your money into and build that position. And once you've reached a certain amount, then you can invest in two companies, then three and four, then five, and then slowly build it up over time because doing a research on 20 different companies all at the same time.

[00:06:20] It's, it's a massive undertaking to read all of their financial statements, understand all the news to see who's in charge to see what products they got going on. It's it's far too much to look at all in one go. So it's best to pick a company that you want to have a look at, see if it matches the criteria that you choose for yourself.

[00:06:42] And if it does add it to a list, but put 5, 6, 7, are those onto the list. And then just pick one of those companies, build a position, then choose the next one, the next one, the next one. And that's essentially it in order to keep it as simple as possible. And if you don't want to do that, there's other options as well.

[00:07:01] You can invest in exchange, traded funds or ETFs, or you can invest in index funds as well, which are a pool of companies managed by a financial institution and they will pick the companies for you. And what you do is you put your money in a, manage it for you, and then you still get the difference from that as well.

[00:07:28] Viktoriia Miracle: Yeah, and it's super awesome because they also have different indexes in different countries. I just came back from Russia and they have like their own indexes, like America has Sika S P 500, the most, the most famous one, right. And, it's kind of steady because if you look at it like 10 years what it was performing, you can obviously see like, is it, is it there's a good decision?

[00:07:50] It's definitely people know what they're choosing for distinctive spawns. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was absolutely amazing and I would love for you. I know you are having a free gift for our audience, so what it is?

[00:08:05] Oliver Locke: Oh, well, it's, it's just offer free advice and I'm always free to answer direct messages or anything like that.

[00:08:12] So if you've got any questions or queries or anything more specific to your own personal situation, whether you're in the UK or the US or any other country, I've been able to speak with enough people in enough countries to be able to give some more general advice, to be able to get you started, whether that's the platforms to choose, or whether it's particular companies to have a look at, how to keep the process simple, how to avoid losing money, how to set up. So that's tax advantaged accounts because in the UK, there are ISIS in the U S there's Roth IRAs and stuff like that, which I know is probably more pension stuff, but it's about maximizing all of that so that you can really make the most out of your money in investing is one side of that.

[00:08:56] Viktoriia Miracle: Obviously, thank you so much. Thank you so much, and if you're watching or listening to this episode, just scroll down. There is going to be a link to this episode page, and there you can find a video, audio, a transcript and all the links that we mentioned in this episode. And also connect with Oliver or me.

[00:09:15] And if you like this episode, please do rate, subscribe or review, that will absolutely warm our hearts. Send us messages and let us know how we did it. Thank you so much, Oliver for coming and thank you so much I'll see you in the next one.