Use your Isa and use it well

Making sure you use your full Isa allowance is the easy bit when it comes to growing your wealth. Knowing exactly what to do with it is where it gets tricky, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

A few numbers for you. Let's say you'd opened an individual savings account (Isa) in 1987. From then on, you used your full allowance every year and put the money into the same fund every year a total contribution of £192,480. How much money do you think you would have now?

According to numbers from FundExpert.co.uk, if you had put it into the Fidelity Special Situations fund, you would have £1,160,000. If you had gone for a FTSE 100 tracker, you would have £514,000. If, on the other hand, you had put the money into Scottish Widows Japan Growth, you would now be sitting on a loss of more than £20,000.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.