Isa investing bestsellers revealed - but is cash still king?

0:02Lee Boyce: Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Trading212. Download the Trading212 app and open a cash ISA with promo code TIM to get the 12-month bonus promo rate of 4.68%. Terms apply. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Lee Boyce. And coming up, ISA season is in full swing as savers and investors race to beat the clock to fill up their allowance. But where are people putting their money? Simon reveals the ISA bestsellers of 2026. Also today, fresh warnings sounded over Britain's midlife pensions crisis. But it's not too late to build a healthy retirement pot. We'll tell you how.

0:41Lee Boyce: Plus, McDonald's launches trading cards with selected meals and some of the rarest are already listed on eBay for huge sums. And just what is the fastest way to make 10 grand? And five experts, including our very own Mr. Lambert, have been given 500 quid to put into betting crypto stocks, furniture and vintage. But who will win? Don't forget your step to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, with the deadline fast approaching, a lot of people will be topping up their ice as if they can to make the most of the£20 ,000 limit and making some last minute investment decisions.

1:22Lee Boyce: but they're doing it at a pretty uncertain time. So where is the money actually going right now and should you even be investing at all or holding back? But firstly, welcome to you both, Lee, ISA 101, the use it or lose it principle.

1:38Georgie Frost: Yeah, exactly. You get a£20 ,000 limit. You can split that between cash, so savings accounts or stocks and shares ISA. There are also other ISAs but a lot more niche. They're the two main ones. You've got until the end of this financial year to use the most of your allowance. So that£20 ,000 limit refreshes on April the 6th. So what you have now is a lot of people last minute trying to fill up those tax-free pots to basically get your money shielded from the tax man and any interest and any gains made tax-free. So it's become a very, very important cornerstone of people's finances.

2:16Lee Boyce: Absolutely right. Now, we know that the rules are changing soon related to cash and also the amount of cash you can hold in a tax and shares ISA, but that's not coming yet, has it?

2:25Georgie Frost: No, that won't come in until the next tax year, so April 2027. And that changes for under 65s only. So over 65s will still be able to use the full cash ISA allowance. But under 65s will not be able to use the full ISA allowance in cash. £12 ,000 is going to be the limit on the cash element of that. You've still got that full£20 ,000 limit, but it just means that the extra£8 ,000 would have to go into stocks and shares, and you're still free to use the full£20 ,000 limit for stocks and shares. So it's going to limit the amount that under 65s are going to be able to hold in savings accounts in an ISA.

3:04Lee Boyce: That matters, that date, because I just asked the question, should you be investing at all or should you be holding back? And we've still got that 20 ,000 cash ISA limit for under 65s. But Simon, what are investors doing with their ISAs right now? Are we seeing some overall trends in where the money is flowing, especially given the global context that we, again, find ourselves in?

3:29Simon Lambert: Yes, we are. We are seeing some trends in terms of where that money is going. And I'll talk through them in a second. But firstly, I think it's really important to note that even though it's the cash ISA allowance that's changing and that's not coming in for a year, it has never been more important to invest in an ISA. Right. So don't think, oh, well, I'm not holding cash. I've still got an investment ISA. I've still got my 20 ,000 pounds. That doesn't bother me. It's really, really important. And that is because of what is effectively been a sustained raid on investors that goes back way into the last Conservative government.

4:08Simon Lambert: OK, so you can if you invest in a normal account, you are liable for tax on your profits, which is capital gains tax. And you are liable for tax on your dividends through dividend tax. Now, there is a tax free allowance every year for both of those things. But that tax-free allowance has been hacked back to a level at which people are being caught out in a way that they were not before. So the capital gains tax allowance is only£3 ,000 now. It used to be£12 ,300. And we have former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who the last time I checked happened to be a Conservative minister, to thank for that one.

4:48Simon Lambert: So that was a massive attack. And that means that previously you could make£12 ,000 worth of profits a year. That's a lot. A lot of people don't make 12 grand worth of profits a year. But three grand, if you've got long term holdings in shares, funds, investment trusts, ETFs, perhaps you've got some shares you had in the work share save scheme or something like that. It's much, much easier to hit that three grand number. On top of that, the dividend allowance. That's only 500 pounds a year now tax free. Above that, dividends are taxed. And that used to be 2000 pounds before Mr. Hunt got his hands on it.

5:24Simon Lambert: And it's worse because Rachel Reeves has delivered a double whammy of her own. So she's raised capital gains tax rates. For basic rate taxpayers, the capital gains tax rate used to be 10%. It's now 18%. And for higher rate taxpayers, it went up to 24%. And also for dividend tax, that rate is going to rise after April again. So it's really, really important because if you don't invest in an ISA, you're going to get taxed on your profits and your dividends, and that is going to eat into your ability to grow long-term wealth far more probably than deciding where you put your money you know between this fund or that fund a fair point

6:05Lee Boyce: Simon a fair point but generally though taking a look at some of the areas where are people looking at the moment particularly and we've spoken about there's a lot of skepticism about the US. How significant is that?

6:19Simon Lambert: Well, we're seeing people shift away from the US. There's still a lot of money going into the US. There's still a lot of money going into, you know, American dominated tech and into the American dominated global stock market. But we are seeing more of a shift towards the UK, towards emerging markets, towards Europe, and notably also towards gold. So we've got the top-bought funds, trackers-ETFs, investment trusts and shares in ISAs. For example, AJ Bell, the most-bought active fund is the Artemis Global Income Fund, followed by the Vanguard Life Strategy 60 % Equity Fund, Blue Whale Growth Fund, Artemis Smart, GARP, European Equity, Fidelity Special Situations, and so on.

7:11Simon Lambert: In terms of ETFs and trackers, most of it's still going into the global index. So FTSE All World, Vanguard, FTSE All World, HSBC, FTSE All World, Vanguard, FTSE Global, All Cap and so on. Then if you look at investment trusts, interestingly, you've got 24 Income Fund at the top there, City of London Investment Trust, Greencoat UK Wind, Invesco Bonds. So you've got some bonds there, Fidelity Emerging Markets, Temple Bar Investment Trust. and then you know we've got the similar data from some other platforms as well so for example Hargreaves Lansdowne Artemis Global Income is the top fund Vanguard All World is again the top tracker Greencoat UK Wind top investment trust it's really interesting that actually that there's this renewable wind fund that's featuring in both of these lists then again with you know with Fidelity we've got the top one there is the Fidelity Cash Fund that's people moving their money to cash.

8:10Simon Lambert: Then you've got special situations fund. Trackers, again, world index fund. Gold makes an appearance here. Silver makes an appearance here as well. Investment trust, we've got Scottish mortgage, very popular still. Fidelity special values, that's a value orientated investment trust. Fidelity China special situations, again, quite interesting people putting their money into China. And then in terms of shares as well, we've got some big names featuring. Amongst those on our lists. We've got Legal & General, Microsoft, Amazon, NatWest, Legal & General feature again here. Legal & General is actually a very big company.

8:47Simon Lambert: Rolls-Royce, Lloyds Banking Group, Pearson, Barclays, Fresnillo, The Miner. But a name that keeps popping up, interestingly, is Relix. Relix is a company that has been largely decided to have switched from being an AI winner to an AI loser. It's the former Red Xelvia and it deals with basically very high quality information and data that's used in professional situations. And it was considered that companies like this basically could benefit from AI because they hold these large proprietary databases of like really important information, the kind of information that people are willing to pay for.

9:31Simon Lambert: That's been really shaken up over the last few months. And there's this trade that's emerged where there's a decision that software as a service companies and some of these big data companies are now considered to their data is not considered to be worth what it was their lunch is going to be eaten by new versions of chatbots and llms and so on and actually they're now going to be ai losers but there seems to be people thinking that actually companies like relics companies like the london stock exchange group might have been oversold on that and actually the information that they still hold is still incredibly valuable and people will pay for it in year for years to come

10:05Lee Boyce: right there's a lot in that simon lee uh simon mentioned a lot of a lot of words there was just

10:14Georgie Frost: a lot of words there was a breakdown of what of what people invest in but what how i was going to take you are not an investor a seasoned investor that might have sounded like a lot of words so to be fair you did ask me the question of what people were investing in you answered it you

10:28Lee Boyce: answered it beautifully that is no criticism it's exactly right all i'm thinking is for someone listening who is not a seasoned investor who does just think oh i just stick my money in a in a global tracker but actually would like to be a bit more hands-on lee how fast you go about where to go and also the question is do you at this moment well that is a difficult question

10:50Georgie Frost: because obviously the last couple of weeks has been an incredibly uh testing time you know geopolitically which has had a massive impact in markets and there'll be a lot of uh nervous especially novice investors who you know are going to be worried seeing you know that down red arrow on their portfolio you know potentially as a novice investor you have spread your risk around the globe taking out one of those global trackers that Simon mentioned there I would say the more kind of investment trust and individual share picking is probably more for an experienced investor who is probably more used to the peaks and troughs of what goes on globally financial for a crisis, pandemic, you know, going back further into history.

11:32Georgie Frost: So it's about holding your nerve, as we've said on this before. Investing is for the long term. But I was going to point out here, Georgie, that there was some research out at the beginning of the month suggesting that ISA savings are going to be worth more than a trillion pounds this year. It's going to tip over the trillion pound mark, showing just how successful the ISA product has been. But interestingly, in that, there's 115 billion expected to go into ISIS this year. 85 billion of that, a huge surge cash ISIS, with pretty much the rest of it going into stocks and shares, which has stayed quite flat.

12:09Georgie Frost: People are cash stuffing this financial year. They were already doing it before this global, you know, this geopolitical situation unfolded. because of tinkering from the Treasury where there was lots of rumours about what the Chancellor was going to do to the ISA limit, the cash-wise limit, to get people investing. And it's kind of blown up in their face because people have actually gravitated towards cash, thinking this was the last chance to properly fill up their cash-wise. So they might feel the same again next year. So I think that that's a really interesting, you know, people appear to be holding their nerve in terms of stocks and shares investing.

12:45Georgie Frost: This came out at the start of the month, So it could have skewed even differently now. Lots of people are still interested and way more so in putting it in cash, despite all of the data showing that historically investing will give you higher returns. But it's very difficult to say that at the moment. You know, people are nervous. I've had lots of conversations with various people from various jobs over the last couple of weeks who are novice investors, who do have that information at their fingertips and do have this tendency to look a couple of hours a day at what's happening to their money, which I think is a very dangerous game.

13:22Lee Boyce: Lee, you've spoken about suction shares, cash ices, but just to wrap this one up, best cash icer rates out there at the minute. I suppose you don't want to leave it too long if you're opening a new one up as well because the deadline is fast approaching. What rates are we looking at, Lee?

13:36Georgie Frost: Yeah, you don't want to leave it too late, especially with some of the providers, smaller building societies, for example, if that's where you're heading. Bigger banks tend to be a little bit easier to deal with in terms of last minute. But don't leave it to the last minute. I think anything that's got April after the number is probably leaving it a touch too late. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. You don't want to be panicking at the last minute trying to do where you're trying to head with your cash. You can still get 4%. You can still get more than 4 % at a number of providers. And you can go and check them out at our savings tables at This Is Money.

14:13Georgie Frost: That's both easy access and fixed rates. Now, I think I spoke about this recently, Georgie, but the big battle has come from the investing platforms. So the Trading 212s, the Hargreaves, the eToros of this world, and IG as well, they've all offered quite good cash ISA rates with bonuses and stuff attached to them to try and attract people in to become a customer. Essentially, it's almost like the current account switching battle. You know, banks are paying a couple hundred pounds for you to switch bank account. At the moment, lots of the best rates cash-wise are being offered by these investment platforms as almost like a shock window, get you in and become a customer.

15:00Georgie Frost: But you can still find banks, building societies. Nationwide launched a number of ISIS recently that pay above 4%. You know, that's a big name. and whatever you do, you might have your money in your cash ISA with one of your big banks that you bank with. So if your current account is with X bank, you might have your ISA with X bank. They quite often do, they don't offer best buy rates and they offer some of the worst rates that you can ever find and you will drop into those rates if you're not proactive. I would definitely have a look at what rate your ISA is currently paying if you are one of those people in the bank and making sure that you are getting their very best ISA rate if you're taking the lazy cook's way of basically sorting your ISA out because you've left it last minute.

15:42Lee Boyce: Lazy cook's way, I like that. All right, another day, another grim piece of pension research, the latest from Legal & General, who say that there are 5 million British workers who are suffering a mid-life pensions crisis which could lead them facing hardship in retirement. Bad news for us here. I think we're all... I don't know how old you are, Lee, but I won't ask you. It's rude. And saving is most prevalent among 40 to 54-year-olds, and even worse for those in that age group who are single, renting their home, or working part-time. So what is going on, and is it too late to do anything about it?

16:19Lee Boyce: Simon, we have discussed this in the past, haven't we? This particular age group. What is going on?

16:26Simon Lambert: Well, this particular age group is my age group. So I can tell you what's going on and what LNG have found here is that basically there's a chunk of people who were too young to fully reap the rewards of generous final salary pension schemes, defined benefit schemes. And they were too young to benefit from being auto enrolled right at the start of their career. And they will have only been auto enrolled if they changed jobs. Now, most of those people will probably have changed jobs and ended up being auto enrolled, but it might not have been until well into their 30s, for example. And there's a reason why these two things matter.

17:08Simon Lambert: So firstly, final salary schemes. Just a quick, you know, basic explainer of these. These are, that's the common name for something known as a defined benefit pension. And a defined benefit pension is great. You only get them in the public sector now because private sector companies started getting rid of them in the 2000s, up to the point where basically there's hardly any private sector schemes that are still open. And I don't know if there's any private sector schemes that are open to people who join a company. And what that involves is the company says that it will pay you a set amount in retirement for every year that you have worked there and been a member of the pension scheme.

17:45Simon Lambert: So, for example, that might be 1.45. And it used to be based on your final salary, so what you earned on the day you left that company, which is great for most people because usually when you're at a company, your salary goes up over time. So your salary is going to be the highest at the point when you retire. Not guaranteed, but that's likely to be the case. It's now shifted to a thing called career average where it averages out over what you earn at that company over your career. But so say you worked somewhere for 30 years and you were accruing it at 1.45. Well, that would mean that at the end of those 30 years, you get 30.45.

18:24Simon Lambert: So you'd get two thirds, two thirds of your final salary. And it's on the employer to pay you that. It's a promise. It's a binding promise. It's very, very difficult to get out of. And there's protection if the company goes bust. So if you had that and you had years of building that up at a company, you're probably going to be okay. You might not have as much income in retirement as you'd hoped for but you're going to be okay. You've then got defined contribution pots. These are different. You have to save into it, your employer saves into it and at the end of it you've got a pot of money that you have to turn into a retirement income.

19:00Simon Lambert: So you're dependent on how much you put in, how much your employer puts in, the performance of the stock market over time and then also what then happens to the stock market when you retire. Also enrollment at least means that people are put into those defined contribution schemes early and the earlier you start with these things the more you benefit from compounding. So you might only be putting in a very small amount at the start of your career but you put some money in, your employer probably matches it, you get some tax relief, goes in a pot, gets invested, spends 40 years growing, you get a decent retirement pot at the end.

19:36Simon Lambert: If you're in that middle chunk of people, this midlife bunch, well, as I said, you probably didn't benefit from the good thing, the defined benefit pensions, and you probably didn't get into your defined contribution pot early enough. And that means that there is this chunk of people that's been identified for whom there's definitely going to be a crunch when they reach retirement age, and they're either not going to have the income they hope for, they're not going going to be able to retire they're going to have to work out some other way of paying for retirement and it's much worse if you don't own your own home because at least if you've paid off a mortgage by the time you reach retirement you don't have those housing costs built in if on the other hand you're renting then you've still got to find the money that's going to pay for that rent every month right a tough one then lee do you if you're 43 let's just say work hard to pay off your mortgage

20:32Lee Boyce: What do you pay into pension?

20:34Georgie Frost: Well, there's two very difficult, differing goals there. I mean, it's always going to depend on your individual circumstances, but you should never neglect your pension. You know, at the end of the day, it's one of the best tax breaks you're going to get. And we've had talks this week from Labour, from Torsten Bell, talking about the triple lock being under threat. the triple lock is the guarantee on state pension that the pension will go up by 2.5 % CPI or average earnings growth. We're having rumours of that looking like it could be under threat in the next parliament. So you have to take control of what you're doing.

21:15Georgie Frost: And actually, I was looking at this research, George, I was reading this research, and it does make for quite worrying reading no i'm not 40 yet uh i'm still a year and a bit away uh but it's this this research from energy is saying for average pension fund for 47 year old this is the the data that it crunched from from the report it did um the average pension fund for 47 year old is 27 000 pounds and the median retirement fund figure is just for much 27 000 for a 40 something year old yeah and the median retirement fund figure is just four thousand pounds for renters at that age and six thousand pounds for part-time workers and that is um research that it did uh among 25 to 54 year olds and it found that nine million people in total could be under saving and risking hardship in old age um there's still that kind of comfort blanket of the state pension uh and thinking you know probably not as much our age but maybe a touch older than us that it's going to give you enough in retirement um it's just simply not true not if you want a properly comfortable retirement um and you the onus now is on us as Simon said you know with your private pension um and you should look into what your company is offering you should look at whether it's going to match your contributions in some cases if you've been at a certain place for a certain amount of time It might be that they offer even more generous than that.

22:43Georgie Frost: And you should just make sure that you're taking control of your retirement. I mean, this is going to be a hot topic over the next few decades. There's been all sorts of reports out lately suggesting that a state pension age might be pushed up to 80. There was one this week suggesting that a state pension age is going to be pushed up to 75. You've got to make sure that you've not got your head in the sand. And I would say if you are someone in their 40s or 50s and you think you've left it too late, you've just got to crack on with it and get what you can and do what you can with it and make the most of that tax break and make the the most of you know auto enrollment i mean auto enrollment has been i would argue a relative success you know it has got people in their 20s and 30s i was just about the generation that has been uh that prime spot of being auto enrolled and just taking control of it and i've taken a more of an active interest in it as i have got older and once i have hit those life goals of buying a house for example you know you start taking it a little that little bit more seriously but the earlier start of course as we always say the easier it is and there was some some interesting figures in here actually that tanya jeffries our investment and pensions editor put in here originally there was a this this lng research um is talking about um this mrr minimum replacement uh rent which is basically it's talking about income target figures for your pension and what it should pay out pensions uk estimates the minimum a single person needs to get by is 13 400 pounds a year or 21 600 pounds as for a couple but lng also factoring the cost of rent and uses a target replacement rate the amount your salary retirement should you aim to replace i was looking at this pensions commission it was from the early 2000s um and the replacement rate was updated a few years ago by the institute of fiscal studies i thought it was interesting just to read it out so you can kind of get an idea of what you might potentially need for retirement so it says it finds that people are earning up to around 17 000 pounds a year need need an income worth 80 percent of their previous wage from 17 000 to 31 500 it is 70 percent from that level to 45 000 pounds it is 67 percent from there to 90 000 pounds it is 60 and if you earn 90 000 plus it is 50 you know it's a real rule of you know a kind of broad rule of thumb that um it does give an indication of you know what you might need and i know i say this i've said this a million and one times as podcast georgie but go away crunch those figures look at compounding calculators look at what where you're going to be at age 55 age 60 age 65 age 70 and your current trajectory if you can spare an extra one percent to put it into your pension and it's not going to hit your lifestyle detrimentally i would go away and have a look at that um you know as a priority i think that saving into your private pension is going and building up a big enough pot is going to be crucial uh if you want a good a good standard of

25:36Lee Boyce: living when you hit retirement age yeah and i will bang the drum for self-employed people because we really are on our own but i was interviewing a financial advisor many moons ago we said look It's really hard to find a figure of how much is a good pot. I know people say, oh, it comes down to your salary and your da-da-da. But sometimes it's nice just to go, am I on the right path? Because it's not something we say, hey, Lee, how much you got in your pot?

26:03Georgie Frost: And you, I do. I always go to my friends, how much have you got in your pot? I had a friend that was self-employed for many years. He works for a company now. And I banged on to him for ages about opening a tip. And I'd openly tell him how much was in my pension and how much the returns have been over that past year because there's nothing better than being open and honest about your finances and trying to actually give a real-life living example of why it's important to put money away in a pension.

26:29Lee Boyce: When it feels so far away, that's the thing.

26:32Georgie Frost: At that conversation, we were probably in our early to mid-30s and I think there's that tendency to go, oh, yeah, I'm going to be retiring for 30, 40 years, so I'll kick that down the road and I'll do that next year. And that's a completely logical way of thinking. And I totally understand it. But I think the more we can be open and honest with our close friends and family and kind of really, you know, reiterate how important this is, I think the better.

27:00Lee Boyce: 100%. Free the pension figures. That's what I say. I'm going to normalise chatting with your mates, how much they've got. But actually, this financial advisor said to me, oh, well, I would say for someone who just turned 50, half a million. I thought, oh, that's punchy. and so that's what I had in my head is that's that's what people people should have to and if you haven't so I've sort of been embarrassed to say to people how much I would have in because I don't have half a million in my pension top even though I did I wasn't able to save because as you know I had a big major back injury and so I I had a pause in my pension actually I was reading some standard life research about how much pauses cost people in retirement and the average that they people pause their pension contributions for is two years but one in seven pause for about five plus years which can cost you know tens of thousands of pounds and so the advice there is just get back on it.

27:55Lee Boyce: Simon?

27:55Simon Lambert: Yeah and actually LNG talked about this they gave a strategy for building 187 ,000 pound pot even if you've got nothing so if you and you were starting at 47. So LNG estimates a 47 year old paying into a pension for the first time could contribute auto-enrollment minimum of 8 % over two decades and save a£116 ,000 fund by age 67. Now, if you increase your personal contribution rate by 1 % each year, so 12 % of your salary was going into your pension, your fund could reach£187 ,000, they reckon. Now, that's not going to buy you a particularly luxurious retirement, just to be clear. okay that financial advisor in essence was kind of right because if you look at those pensions uk figures and you look at the cost of a moderate retirement and then you multiply it up by you know what's considered to be a safe amount of money to take out of your pension each year is about four percent so you need to times the the income amount that you want by 25 you soon start to reach some disturbingly large numbers um you know if you want 40 grand a year in retirement you can need a million that's a lot right yeah most people aren't going to get anywhere near that but 250 000 pounds is achievable right and and if you can over the over the lifetime of a working lifetime if you've got 250 000 pounds now you could look at it i'm about to give some advice that any financial advisor listening to actually i'm sorry i'm about to say i'm about to say something that any financial advisor listening to this will vehemently disagree with and say that i am completely wrong and it's irresponsible of me to say this and they are right because you need to be careful about how much you take out of your pot because if you're doing it and keeping it invested the problem is it's all very well if it if the markets stay pretty good but if they go down you've got this risk where you're taking money out as your pot's going down and you're depleting it even quicker but you can look at it as a safe amount to take out of your 250 000 pound pot is four percent a year right that is the safe amount that you can take out but you can also look at it as if you go right well 250 000 pound pot how long am i going to be retired for maybe 20 years so say you retired at 65 or 70 20 25 years 25 years let's say 25 years right well that's 10 grand a year isn't it So if I mean, you'd have to be really lucky to make it be 10 grand a year, but it's not inconceivable that you could spread 250 ,000 pounds over 25 years and get 10 grand a year.

30:40Simon Lambert: And if that you have that 10 grand a year on top of a state pension of 12 ,000 pounds, well, that's a substantial difference to the amount of money that you're getting every year. so I guess it comes back down to the bit where like LNG are saying if you are in this position don't stick your head in the sand do something about it because you'll be in a much better position if you do something about it than if you don't do something about it and it gets to 20 years time and you've still got a number that's closer to zero than one that's going to get you a reasonable retirement.

31:15Lee Boyce: Right I was just thinking though that the reason that was so surprising to me and perhaps the reason that lee was talking with the conversation he was having with his friend i think is a lot of people just don't realize the magnitude of the figures that they're going to have to deal with so they think yeah it's fine i'll just deal with it another day another day another day it will take some time to get figures that will give you that decent lifestyle that you

31:39Georgie Frost: want in retirement you've got a remuneration which is very quickly on that is that you hit that first say 20 000 pounds then you hit the 50 000 pounds then you hit 100 000 pounds in your pension pot the compounding starts to really take effect and then all of a sudden it feels like not such an unachievable goal you mentioned that half a million pounds at 50 yes that is people are way off if you take that lng uh research at face but a lot of people aren't and a lot of people will be hitting those targets and again that's the message i would tell people especially if you're in your late 20s early 30s that those targets they start to kind of you knock down those dominoes pretty quickly once the pot starts getting bigger so just stick with it um it might feel like you're getting nowhere at the beginning and then it starts to kind of feel a little bit brighter and then all of a sudden you're like wow okay um you know potentially return if you if you get an annual return on your pension of five ten percent and you've got six figures in there and you're continuing to contribute to it all of a sudden it doesn't look unfeasible plus the magic of

32:33Simon Lambert: compounding which means earning returns on returns that you've already made means that if you save or invest for 40 years instead of 30 years you double your money exactly only two things have made me as

32:46Lee Boyce: proud in life. My pension pot. I'm getting a B in physics A level. Anyway, moving on. Forget happy meals. It's true. Forget by one mark. Forget happy meal toys and sunglasses. Do you remember those? Lee, you won't, but I do. 1992, they were out. Anyway, McDonald's has tapped into the surge of interest around trading cards and this week launched packets of their own designs with selected meals and already some are being, that's why we're talking about it, obviously, being listed on online market sales for sale for more than 40 quid, and in some examples, north of 150 quid. Now, last month, of course, everybody knows this.

33:22Lee Boyce: US influencer Logan Paul sold a rare Pikachu card for nearly$16.5 million after apparently 41 days of furious bidding. So could we see similar prices, Lee? I might be getting a bit carried away with that, but we don't need to delve into US influencers. but trading cards, they've always had a bit of an appeal, haven't they, certain trading cards but what's this surge of interest?

33:51Georgie Frost: The last couple of years there's definitely been a massive shift in people have gotten into trading cards once again and they kind of really came into their own in the late 90s with Pokemon and you were talking about Pikachu there and I know when something's gone really kind of crackers is when my mum says to me well did you see that Pokemon card that sold for$16 million? I mean, when my mum said that, who has absolutely no interest in the news whatsoever, I was quite surprised. That's what you know. So I've looked into this before because my nephew's quite into Pokemon cards and trading cards, sports trading cards.

34:23Georgie Frost: And I went to a trading card show with him about 18 months ago. And I was fascinated by the characters that were there. Of course, the usual kind of people you would expect at that kind of event. But there were some really well-dressed people. Clearly, this is their business, or at least their side business, in which they are spending thousands and thousands of pounds essentially buying and selling trading cards, hoping ones are going to grow in value and all that kind of thing. And it's kind of followed me around since that trading card thing. I went to an event back when the NFL was in London.

34:57Georgie Frost: I went with a company called Whatnot to go and watch the NFL. Now, Whatnot is a little bit like eBay, but with live selling, which eBay has now actually started to do. And we did a kind of unveiling there. So we had some cards to open up to pull the cards out, basically, and see if you've got anything good. And I pulled out a signed card. So you get players. So I had an NFL player that had signed his card, his rookie card. And you hope that that rookie guy, so the guy that might be playing his first season, you've got his signature card, you keep it in good condition. You hope that his career absolutely kicks off and that'll be worth a fortune in the past.

35:30Georgie Frost: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, cards from that era, when they first kicked off, their kind of early cards are going for big money you think my um basketball players like michael jordan those really old cards they go for a really big buck so there's kind of like two elements to this you've kind of got the sporting card sporting trading card and you've got the sort of pokemon disney cards and that kind of thing and i'll give you one more example um tops who make a lot of the sports trading cards were taken over by a big us company called fanatics a couple of years ago and they opened a store in Piccadilly Circus probably about a year ago and I actually went along last month with a friend we were in London we popped along the queue to get into the shop was absolutely phenomenal and inside there people were spending so much money you think cost of living crisis you know people have got money to do this and it's become a massive thing on social media to basically buy expensive cards open them on social media and they're like on Instagram and stuff and people watch those videos and see if someone's going to pull a rare card and some of these cars can go for absolutely huge amounts of money so this is where mcdonald's comes into it it's been it's been quite clever it's kind of known that this is a kind of phenomenon people back into and they started doing these adult happy meals right so the last one that it did a couple months ago was well actually about a month six weeks ago was friends characters there were six to collect these friends characters that you got with an adult happy meal far more expensive than the child's happy meal you're talking seven eight pounds to get one of these rather than sort of three four pounds for a happy meal um and you've got a character um trading cards have replaced that this is a thing that started this uh this weekend's going on until the end of april and there's 24 cards to collect um and if you've got children you'll know this um they they've done it in a kind of list of uh kind of common cards slightly rare cards rarer cards and And then they've called legendary cards as the last category.

37:23Georgie Frost: So they're in blocks of six. And there's six legendary cards that are technically the rarest ones. And these are the ones that are going on eBay for quite a lot of money. And the ones that people are looking for. There's also 10 Ronald McDonald gold cards that will pay you 10 ,000. They'll give you a 10 ,000 pound prize if you find one of those. So we're talking, it's very gimmicky. You know, and you'd have to be, you know, pretty hardcore into this to be going to eat McDonald's every day, dropping seven, eight pounds to get a pack of trading cards for four cards that you get in there. You won't be dropping seven or eight pounds

37:54Lee Boyce: if you eat in McDonald's every day, I assure you.

37:57Georgie Frost: No, but to get this... In weight. No, no, well, no, quite. But that's the only way you can get a hold of them. So, in the name of research yesterday... Well, I was going to say, Simon, get your phone out.

38:08Lee Boyce: Simon, get your phone out. I feel like we should live stream this. I don't know if any of us knows how to live stream. So let's just get your phone out and film this momently. Give it your best social media influencer. vibe.

38:19Georgie Frost: And you're going to have to

38:20Lee Boyce: describe this like a great sports commentator because we are just listening to this. Lee, the moment's yours.

38:26Georgie Frost: I've already opened the packet so I wasn't wasting time on the podcast and I'm going to rustle it so you can hear. So I'm looking in here. I've got the first four cards. Okay, we've got a McDonald's pizza card. That's a retro one. Straw dispenser. That's another retro one. Apple pie tree. Retro one. And then a character card. McNugget buddies. And I've got three, six chicken McNuggets with that one. Come on. so I can go get some more McDonald's. Right, pack two. Here we go. I'm going fast. Hit that, Russell. It's there, it's there.

38:52Lee Boyce: I feel like you need some more, Lee. No, come on. I'm not that excited.

38:55Georgie Frost: Right, we've got a fry scoop. Look at that. That's quite cool. Number two.

38:59Simon Lambert: Does that mean free food?

39:01Georgie Frost: You've got to collect numbers one, two, three, and four to get a free medium selected meal. Oh, look how cool that is. Hamburglar.

39:09Lee Boyce: Oh, and I've won a free hamburger or a cheeseburger

39:11Georgie Frost: or mayo chicken with that one.

39:13Lee Boyce: Ooh.

39:14Georgie Frost: And then I've got another fan card. There's a gherkin card. and then oh milkshake dip look at that that's quite fun right last one come on i've got a can you feel it can you almost no you won't believe this i'm absolutely baffled as to whether

39:30Lee Boyce: he's got tens of thousands of pounds here i've got another i hold up three filo fish

39:37Georgie Frost: filo fish or four nuggets but i've got a little fish for my wife i've got a legendary card i've got one of the ones on ebay that's going for that being listed for 40 pounds here we go here we go um a molten apple pie which you know actually i think i've had an apple pie once from mcdonald's and it was molten so i kind of like the way they're poking fun at themselves there it's probably still hot yeah probably is so that legendary card um i should point out here they're going up on ebay for big bucks but because it's so early we're not seeing what they're actually selling for so of course on ebay i could i could go and put this card up uh for a thousand pounds on ebay you know i can go and do what i want with it what i'm going to go and do is i'm going to go and list it on ebay for five pounds and then i'll let you know this time let's speak how much it sells for

40:24Lee Boyce: how's that sound yeah i feel like we had a lot of words from simon at the start and i feel like we've equally had a lot of words from you now so i'm a bit confused what the hell do you actually have so we've got a filio fish how much how much hang on a minute right oh well how much free food

40:40Georgie Frost: do you have from those packs? Okay, so I should point out here that I bought two meals yesterday to get two packs of cards and for some reason they gave me three packs. So they gave me a bonus pack winner. So out of those, I have got six free Chicken McNuggets, I've got a free hamburger, cheeseburger or mayo chicken and I've got another one which is a filo of fish or four Chicken McNuggets. I'll need to go and work out if I've got enough of the numbers to go and get a proper meal but you have to claim it via an app and I'm not getting a McDonald's app. I don't eat in there. Anyway, I've got a legendary card.

41:14Georgie Frost: That's the exciting thing. And this Filet-O fish card might be my favourite. I mean, that is pretty cool. It's a little fish with a net looking happy. It's put a smile on my face, Georgie. That's all I can say.

41:27Lee Boyce: And I hope the listeners too. I mean, when you think it couldn't get more exciting, this show, we are even going to crank it up a notch because Simon's taking part in a very exciting experiment, can we call it? Basically, to find out the quickest legal way to£10 ,000. The Mail, and this is money, have given Simon and four other experts£500 to put to work. Simon, all friendly banter, it's not. You better win. What's this about?

42:00Simon Lambert: This is the race to£10 ,000 and I would describe it as a challenge, I think, is the way to describe it. And we have each been given£500 and the challenge is to try to turn it into£10 ,000 or as close to£10 ,000 in the shortest possible time that we can. So, firstly, I should say this is obviously not guidance on what to do with your money or how to invest. Trying to turn£500 into£10 ,000 in the quickest possible time is a recipe for losing money fast, not making money fast, particularly if you're going to be doing something like buying and selling shares, which is what I'm doing. I'm not even sure whether buying£500 worth of McDonald's would end up in£10 ,000 worth of winnings from what Lee's just done on the podcast now.

42:49Simon Lambert: But it might do. You never know. so anyway there's myself there's a crypto trader there's a sports better note the high risk stuff going on here but we've also got a fashion reseller and an antiques dealer okay so aim of the game try to get to 10 000 as quickly as possible don't lose all your money and that's it so right i obviously this goes against everything i've ever learned about investing so that's all out the

43:20Lee Boyce: window so i need to be trading how long have you got did you say well until we get there you've got

43:24Simon Lambert: to try to get to 10 000 pounds so if someone gets to 10 000 pounds in a week we've got a week

43:28Lee Boyce: if someone oh i mean obviously go on and on yeah i mean there will come a point where we just

43:35Simon Lambert: tot it up and see who's winning and maybe call time it gets too long yeah look so okay right i work this out okay now a reasonable return from the stock market would be seven percent a year Okay, that would be considered a decent average return from the stock market. In some years you get better, in some years you get worse. Now, I could turn£500 into£10 ,000 using the stock market. But at that rate of return, it would take me 43 years. Jessica Beard, my colleague who is running the challenge, has told me I do not have 43 years. So I will need to take a bit more risk than that. Currently, we are on effectively day one of yours truly, investing his money.

44:16Simon Lambert: my strategy I think is to try and buy stuff that's going up that morning buy stuff that's got good results I've seen this from when we did a share picking game a couple of years back where basically try and get in early in the morning take your profits move out that was how the winner did it I obviously need to spread my risk a bit but you don't want to do it too much so maybe across five shares but then that's a hundred pounds and then even if your share goes up by 20 you've only made 20 so i've got to try to work out how i do this um as we speak i'm down two pounds six p could be worse okay could definitely be better i think that my money is on the fashion reseller and the antiques dealer i think this is going to prove that if you want to try to make money out of stuff quickly then it helps to be dealing with real stuff um and obviously

45:12Lee Boyce: Also, isn't it quite time dependent as well? You are. We were talking about stock market, quite a difficult time. Crypto, a lot of people pulling money out of crypto. Like, you know, had this been a few years ago, crypto might have done it with some random. thing. Might have done with some kind of meme coin and you're still getting that stuff. Exactly.

45:28Simon Lambert: Even when things are down and even when things are bad opportunities present themselves the pendulum swings too far the wrong way and so on and people are always after an opportunity to try and make a quick buck with a meme coin or a penny stock. I should say also that we are also up against a monkey with a pin which is the modern day version of a monkey with a pin which is a monkey, it's not a real monkey it's a toy monkey that we have used to randomly select 10 penny shares and we'll see how it goes

45:57Georgie Frost: as well.

45:58Simon Lambert: Excellent. Anyway you can come to the site, come to This Is Money where you'll find the race to£10 ,000 and follow it there and we'll keep people updated.

46:06Georgie Frost: Can I just say can I just say no offence

46:08Simon Lambert: to Simon but I am strongly rooting for the monkey.

46:11Georgie Frost: I really am rooting for the monkey and the second thing I was going to say imagine if I had pulled that Ronald gold card and won£10 ,000 and the race to£10 ,000 was just hijacked by me saying I'd won it via a McDonald's trading card game. And me buying it off you for£500.

46:30Simon Lambert: Sold. £497 ,094 because I'm down£2.06. On the plus side, you may be rooting for the monkey but a conversation with one of our colleagues in the sports department yesterday, he told me that the entire sports department was just rooting for me to beat the sports betting guy.

46:46Georgie Frost: Yeah.

46:48Lee Boyce: Alright Simon, stat of the week.

46:50Simon Lambert: Stat of the week is actually a not great stat that I'm going to give you. And the not great stat that I'm going to give you as I build up to it is 1.7 million. That is the number of British households whose heating bills are estimated to have doubled since the Iran war broke out. these are people who are on heating oil so they're off the gas grid and they have to buy heating oil for their heating and the price of that has doubled we're seeing some really quite astonishing figures coming out of it and they are the kind of the you know the first victims of the spike in the cost of living and the volatility that this could cause for the uk in terms of the cost of living

47:41Lee Boyce: all right then thank you very much simon thank you lee and thank you for listening you can keep keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app and if you have any comments or questions for the team or anything you'd like

47:53Simon Lambert: and to look into simon you can email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk or come to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash podcast to find podcast pass and join in the debate and read the comments and if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us it helps other people find us too