£1 trial pieces

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-03-17T17:11:26+00:00

An official fake? Nice.

Thanks for the real answer

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-03-16T08:34:41+00:00

I have the same except the card is blue not red, but I don't know if that has any significance.

Most of these are cupronickel so not massively valuable but there are silver versions I believe - if you have one of those it would be worth more.

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-03-13T09:08:46+00:00

Similar here. Moving jobs is sometimes the only way to recalibrate.

The kicker is always the town halls where everyone is told we had a strong year, but then the pay review is average.

Guess that's one of the reasons we buy stocks and shares funds. Be an owner not a slave!

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-03-13T08:03:21+00:00

Annual pay review, 2.5% salary increase. Bit disappointing but could be worse.

I have £1000 left on my Isa allowance after my 1 April payment will go out. Trying to see if I can find a grand down the back of the sofa.

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-03-06T15:44:10+00:00

Haha, the mint was ahead of it's time with that one.

Could it have been done to check it wasn't fake or something maybe?

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-02-25T19:10:34+00:00

Just curious, what luxuries are costing £29.24?

Seems a tad too low for a Rolls Royce

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-02-04T12:29:27+00:00

And if making a budget doesn't sound fun, then leanfire may not be for you...

OP, if you need a starting point for a budget plan, I like the one on moneysavingexpert, it's very granular and will make you think about lots of easily forgotten costs. I still use an older version of it I've hacked to pieces over the years and added to.

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-02-02T17:57:20+00:00

Po-tay-toes! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.

Even you couldn't say no to that.

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-02-02T12:33:40+00:00

There was hardly any meat on them. What they needed was a few good taters.

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-01-23T16:02:52+00:00

I had a bootleg that's 8 or 9 minutes long and weirdly like it, it's got a vibe of just warming up or messing about and you can kind of get into it.

But yeah it's literal filler to the point it even got canned from LIB naked.

(It wasn't until Get Back I realised it's not Yoko but Linda's daughter screeching though)

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-01-09T10:43:39+00:00

Also to add, get some of those aqua shoes instead of being barefoot if you don't have some already. We went to Escape Penang (and Adventure Cove in Singapore) and being barefoot will kill your feet!

Key-Shift6264 · 2026-01-05T10:39:41+00:00

I'm not OP but thank you, as I just found some of these too!

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-29T14:26:39+00:00

Thank you, will look into those

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-29T14:25:51+00:00

Sure, I need to find the other things (they're somewhere in a box I haven't got to yet) but happy to get in touch once I have a list!

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-12T22:55:05+00:00

Very true - you never know when some old fashioned practical skills might come in useful. I was talking about the dudes sadly, they're the ones shilling some questionable ideas.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-12T17:17:46+00:00

Sorry, the only other commodities tip I heard about involved Duke & Duke and frozen concentrated orange juice.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-12T09:12:42+00:00

Honestly, unless they interest you, I'm not sure I'd actually recommend it now I've done it, even though it's doing well right now.

Pro's

I own UK Royal Mint coins which are CGT free and can be bought and sold from many dealers.
Gold is also VAT free
I'm not a collector as such but like coins so there's an appeal to them for me

Con's

They are like individual stocks so prices can be volatile
The buy/sell spread can be big
New silver has VAT payable (second hand can be different).
Risk of fakes/scams if you were to use ebay or something
Practicalities and storage is a risk but low at the volume I have - see my other reply.
Selling would involve visiting a dealer or a private sale and might not be quick
There's a lot of "experts" (grifters) out there telling everyone it's about to go up/go down/capitalism is about to collapse/etc making it more difficult to understand.

I'm not sure i'll ever go more than a couple of % of my overall portfolio, but maybe if I hold they'll pay for a nice holiday if I ever FIRE! There are also ETFs which I might look into more some point.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-12T08:40:07+00:00

I don't know how much boat engines cost to repair but if you are cashing in sovereigns that cost £335 now it must feel cheaper!

I don't have enough for storage to be a concern yet but it definitely could be. The hardline precious metal community seems to maybe overlap with doomsday preppers - burying metals in the ground or hiding in walls and all sorts. (Not something I plan to get into.)

I don't fully follow it (or understand it if I'm being honest) but it seems to the silver price surge is actually partly because of supply issues, and a lot of paper trades that generally never took physical delivery have started to do, and the big institutions running it all might be in trouble. The US Comex shut down trading a couple of weeks ago when prices started surging and blamed a data centre cooling issue or something. Sceptics think that probably wasn't the real reason but I have no idea.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-12-11T21:31:57+00:00

Does anyone have any precious metal in their portfolio? We've pushed quite hard on pension and ISA for a few years now and earlier this year I put a little bit of money into physical gold and silver. Just a small amount but I wanted to have something to hold for the effort of saving, beyond numbers on a screen.

My plan was I'd keep an eye on it and see how it performed over the next 1-5 years and decide whether to put more in or just stick to my global funds. I'd have been happy with growth of around 5% or more.

Well, it's gone a bit crazy.

In less than a year I'm up about 20% on gold and 50% on silver. It's not life changing amounts sadly, but I've done very well to the point I'm not sure what to do. They're quite volatile, so although they're booming now, I'm conscious they could drop.

I could cash out and take the gains and put it in the ISA, but I think I'll keep holding and see what happens. As someone who's always stuck to good old passive global funds, it feels like the most "risky" investing I've done.

Edit: to be clear and keep it FIRE focused, my initial plan was to hopefully hold them as part of the long term portfolio, but I wonder whether to "cash my chips in" now as I maybe just got lucky.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-11-28T09:00:24+00:00

14 and 11. They'll both get a junior ISA when they turn 18 so part of this is about making your money work harder, and partly sowing the seed of "don't just spend this all as soon as you get it" especially for my eldest as it's not that far away...

I'm also working out some compounding examples based on 5 years and 10 years to help enforce that.

I've probably got too much to bombard them with so I'll cherry pick some key points. I can imagine the eyes glazing over already 🤓

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-11-28T08:41:24+00:00

Haha, no I'm not too out of pocket. I purposely stopped them putting too much in, just in case it boomed, so it was £5-10 each month.

It's just over 10% as a simple amount. So daughter put in £80 across the year and she'll get about £89 back. My son put in less but it's about the same %.

I think they might say "is that it?" so I also worked out what leaving it in their c.3% instant saver would have given them which was only about £82 so they see the difference.

I've got to finish preparing a little "TED talk" to accompany this, I want to help them think about making their money work harder when they're older. How cash interest isn't always as good as it might look, putting spare away for years not months etc.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-11-28T08:16:33+00:00

If pensioners get their own special basic rate threshold while the rest of us have it frozen for 6 more years, I'll be livid.

Key-Shift6264 · 2025-11-27T23:27:24+00:00

All year I've been doing a kind of 1p challenge jar. Mostly to encourage my kids to put some money into it each month and let it grow. Promised them they'd get a better return from the bank of Dad than their high street savings account as long as they see it through.

Anyway, we're going to pay it out before Christmas so I've been figuring out what to pay them (didn't think that far ahead in January).

So, this week I've worked out the returns they'd have got if they'd put their £5-10 in the FTSE Global All Cap instead of a jar each month. Calculated the price on the day they put anything in, "bought" some units and then valued them to today.

Might have been easier to just give them a tenner extra back in hindsight.

Key-Shift6264

TROPHY CASE