Dan Malone

You're listening to The Irish Times.

I think the first thing I would say to Sarah, and I won't labour on this point because I know you've covered it in previous episodes, is that because I view investing as always long-term investing, the first port of call is always going to be the pension.

So if Sarah actually is interested in long-term investing, the journey starts with the pension.

It doesn't start with the investing platforms.

It doesn't start with a personal investment portfolio.

And the reason for that is it's just infinitely more tax efficient to invest using your pension and the potential for returns are a lot greater doing that.

So we'll assume that Sarah has exhausted her maximum personal pension contributions and she still has money left over at the end of the month that she's looking to put to work in an investment fund.

Again, we'll assume that she has her emergency fund in place because, again, you shouldn't be investing all of your cash and have no buffer there in case you need to access that cash account.

I think the step one is to pick a broker, is to pick an investing platform.

And for me right now, and I already said full disclosure, we do have affiliate agreements with them, but I do generally believe that Trading212 is the most user-friendly investing platform at the moment for beginners in Ireland.

Going back to that point again about like really friendly user interface, very seamless kind of app experience and the low fees and the zero commission is really important.

But that's not the only choice.

You know, you could go with your Trade Republic series year or light year, whatever it is.

So Sarah would start by downloading those apps.

And the other thing to know is that a lot of these apps are free, totally free to download.

So, you know, if it's a case that you want to download them and deposit like 20 quid onto it and just try out different platforms to see like which one makes most sense to you, which one you like the feel of, because that is important as well.

It's the actual feel of the app and how comfortable you are in it too.

So once Sarah has her app kind of set up,

The next thing I would be saying is like, are you kind of committed to this idea of long term investing?

It's not going to be something that you're going to be doing for two or three years and say, I know I've had enough of this.