O/T Best place to put £500 per month

[Lowbankclaret]

Use Vanguard and invest in an ETF via an online brokerage. Very low fees. Head for a "target date retirement fund" account. Pick your year for retirement and the fund wraps up a range of stocks. Can withdraw money whenever you like and does not have to sit there locked in although I recommend that it does.

Unfortunately I think your first sentence will have lost most folk!!

[brunlea99]

The best option is to diversify your investments/savings. Don't invest the £500 in one option - spread it around. There are some well reputed investment platforms about - a couple being AJ Bell and Best Invest, to invest in a Stocks and Shares ISA. Have a look at their websites, they have some good information on there. You don't need to put all your £500 each month into any of these - possibly a proportion and the rest spread over some other alternative as described above. I can only go on my experience, but I've been using a Stocks and Shares ISA for about 15 years now (£200 per month) and I have done very well. The returns can vary which is why you need to view this as a long term investment.

[mealdeal]

You can do a lot worse than just using a multi-asset fund.

In the UK, the Vanguard Lifestrategy and Blackrock Consensus are around the cheapest. These funds will give you exposure to a diversified range of funds and asset classes and you can choose your level of risk via a % of shares to bonds/gilts/property/cash.

The Vanguard range are Lifestrategy 20/40/60/80/100 where the number is the percentage of the fund that is invested in shares via underlying index funds.

Its cheap, its simple, it provides genuine diversification and no extra work doing things like rebalancing your portfolio. I'm currently in the slow process of moving my entire SIPP into just one of these funds.

But do your own research and crucially, be smart and be your own financial advisor because no one cares as much about your money as you do.

[pompeyclaret]

Another opting for Vanguard- very low rates and good spread of funds.

Utilizing for a personal pension.

Can't guarantee any returns, but would prefer a bit of risk than getting 1-2% in a cash savings account.

Having a cash buffer of a few months wages is a must for a starting point too.

[Spike]

Premium bonds

Go win the jackpot

the number of prizes go down from May but you can do as little as fifty quid a month now.

Pension tax relief gives you the biggest tax uplift but maybe wait a few weeks until the budget.

Stocks and shares ISA needs to match your attitude to risk

or a mixture of all 3!

[Gordaleman]

Buy as much .999 Silver as you can lay your hands on. At the moment, a kilo costs about £500, depending where you buy it from. So a kilo bar a month?

Gold, to an extent, Palladium and Rhodium have gone ballistic recently and Silver has a lot of catching up to do. In 2011 it reached almost $50 an ounce. At the moment, it's only just over $18 When it goes, it will really go.