Outsourcing

How much do I outsource and how much does it cost?

Deliveroo scoots round with supper pretty often; The Times is delivered on weekdays, The Financial Times (the pink ‘un) on Saturdays; a cleaner comes weekly; shirts go to the dry cleaner; bulky essentials come delivered by Ocado or Tesco; Derek comes to clean the windows every three months; in the autumn somebody comes to cut back the garden; in the summer Kate does my tax return. I used to get the car washed but there’s no point when Bertie is a regular rider. The most expensive outsourcing is going out to restaurants – a  source of great pleasure but quite expensive. It all adds up but we don’t go on lavish holidays.

Some people teeter up ladders to clean gutters, cut hedges (risking ad hoc amputations), and iron their own shirts; they have a sense of fulfilment – all that money saved. Some people give a fund manager discretion to invest their savings. That’s a luxury that costs somewhere between 0.75% and 1.5% a year. If you are fortunate to have a million quid in your portfolio you will be paying at least £10,000 a year for a fancy valuation statement and a dull annual meeting. I do not regret looking after my money myself; other people just aren’t as interested in it as I am. A small success, so far, is Herald Investment Trust tipped by The Daily Telegraph this week. Here’s how it has done. I bought in November 2020.

It makes me wonder. Should I be content watching the McInroy & Wood Balanced Fund and Personal Assets Trust ratchet up reliable high single figure annual returns? Or should I go to the races? Well I’m doing both but I’m adding to those safe havens as I get older and inevitably less astute at monitoring developments. Of course I’m paying the fund managers but I am not paying a manager of fund managers.