Eli

Very normal to feel this. Side projects are slow in a way that's hard to sit with because you're comparing them to a salary, which arrives on a fixed date regardless of how the month went. Different shape entirely.

Very common error. If you want a fair comparison, look at money-weighted return rather than the headline index number, or just compare a single early contribution against the index over the same dates.

Completely normal, and the maths of why is more encouraging than it sounds. When you're contributing monthly, your average pound has only been invested for about half the period — so after thirteen months, your money has an average holding time of around six or seven months. A flat-to-slightly-up result over that window is well within ordinary.

The more important thing: at year one your returns are dominated by contributions, not by growth. £6,000 contributed and £110 of growth feels bad, but at year fifteen the growth is the story and the contributions are noise. There's no way to skip that first stretch, and everyone who's been at this a decade went through exactly the same year feeling exactly what you're feeling.

Hinting at more work is not payment. I've lost real money to the future-work promise more than once. Price this job as if it's the only job you'll ever do for them, because statistically it probably is.

Contributions-only rebalancing hadn't clicked as an actual strategy. I do have a sheltered account with about a third of the total in it, so between the two I can probably fix it without selling in taxable at all.

Fair. I think I'd panic at 78 in a bad year, which is probably the answer.

Split it if you can't decide. £150 extra at the loan, £150 invested. You'll clear the loan roughly two years early and still keep investing. Nobody looks back at a 50/50 split and regrets it, whereas both pure options have a version where you feel dumb.

Two overlapping broad funds isn't a mistake worth agonising over — you weren't diversified in the way you thought, but you were also never concentrated in anything dangerous. It's tidiness, not risk.

Small thing that helped me: a one-page description of what a cleanup actually involves and what it costs, as a PDF. People forward a document. They don't forward a conversation.

That trips almost everyone at first. If the platform takes 8% and you spent £200 on software, your taxable figure is well below what hit your bank.

Yes, this is very fixable and you're not in trouble — a year of small side income with payout records is the easiest possible version of this problem. Rules differ by country so get the specifics from your own tax authority's site or an accountant, but the general shape is the same everywhere:

• register as self employed or equivalent, if there's a threshold you've crossed
• pull a full transaction export from the payment platform rather than working from emails
• separate gross sales, platform fees and any refunds, because you're taxed on profit not on payouts
• keep receipts for anything you bought for the business

One evening with the platform CSV in a spreadsheet gets you 90% of the way there. Then one hour with an accountant is worth paying for, because they'll tell you what you can legitimately deduct and you'll likely save more than the fee.

You almost certainly hold the accumulating share class. Accumulating funds reinvest income inside the fund rather than paying it out, so the value shows up in the unit price and neither your cash nor your unit count changes. The distribution figure on the statement is there because in many countries you're still taxed on that income even though you never touched it.

That last part is the bit that catches people. Look up whether your jurisdiction treats accumulated income as taxable — if it does, you need the fund's reported income figures at tax time, and you also need to track it so you don't pay tax twice on the same money when you eventually sell.

Yes — one spreadsheet row per year per fund: date, amount, and whether you've already declared it. It adds to your cost basis in most systems, which reduces the gain when you sell. People who don't track it end up overpaying.