Emma Brooks
Free guide
A practical guide
The Effortless Investor
Emma Brooks
A calm, low-maintenance way to build wealth over decades
96 pages · about 76 minutes to read · PDF
Inside the guide
17 chapters, and what each one leaves you able to do.
- 01
Name the job before you touch the money
You decide what each pound is for and when you might need it, so the plan fits the purpose.
- 02
Shore up the ground you stand on
You sort emergency cash and expensive debt first, so market swings never force a bad sale.
- 03
Learn what you are actually buying
You pin down stocks, bonds, funds and ETFs in plain English, enough to talk about them without a glossary.
- 04
Let time do the heavy lifting
You see compounding and contribution rate at work, and you set a monthly amount you can automate.
- 05
Stop trying to see the future
You test the market prediction habit and build a filter that keeps headlines out of your plan.
- 06
Buy the whole orchard with index funds
You choose broad index funds over stock picking, and you measure the cost of each one you consider.
- 07
Spread the risk without spreading yourself thin
You map your current holdings for accidental concentration and decide a global diversification mix.
- 08
Sort risk into the kinds that matter
You separate volatility, permanent loss, inflation and behaviour, and you score how much you can actually bear.
- 09
Set the stock and bond split that fits
You settle your target allocation from horizon and resilience, and you pass the Sleep-Well Test.
- 10
Build your one-page portfolio plan
You draft the plan with goal, allocation, funds, contributions, rebalancing and change rules on one page.
- 11
Move a windfall in on purpose
You choose a lump sum or a fixed staging schedule for any large cash amount, and you write the rule down.
- 12
Count every fee you pay to invest
You add up expense ratios, platform fees, trading costs and taxes, and you decide which ones you can cut.
- 13
Run the checklist when the market falls
You work through a crash checklist that stops panic trades and tells you when rebalancing is the right move.
- 14
Catch your brain before it catches you
You name the bias most likely to trip you up and write one rule that makes that mistake harder.
- 15
Filter the noise and keep the signal
You apply a six-question filter to any financial claim, and you cut one source that only makes you anxious.
- 16
Make the system run on its own
You automate contributions, schedule a five-minute monthly check and an annual review, and you lock change triggers.
- 17
Start today with a thirty-day roadmap
You follow a week-by-week plan that takes you from goal statement to funded, automated, documented portfolio.
Look inside
Two real pages, set exactly as they print.
01
Name the job before you touch the money
You decide what each pound is for and when you might need it, so the plan fits the purpose.
This book is for the person who has money to set aside, a life they want to protect, and no appetite for turning investing into a second job. By the end of this chapter, you will have written one page describing what each pot of money is for, when you might need it, and what job it will do between now and then. That page will be the foundation for every decision you make from here. You will not have bought anything. You will have made the decision that stops you buying the wrong thing later.
Start with the money you have, not the money you want. Open your bank statements or your banking app and write down the balances in every account you can spend from or save into. Include the current account you use for bills, the savings account you opened with good intentions, the workplace pension you have not looked at in years, and the cash sitting in a drawer if it is more than a few hundred pounds. You are not judging any of this money. You are labelling it, and the label comes before the investment.
The label is a time horizon, and you have three to choose from. Near-term money is anything you might spend within five years: the holiday, the car repair, the deposit on a flat, the buffer for a month when work dries up. Medium-term money sits somewhere between five and fifteen years away, like a house purchase or school fees, where you have some flexibility about the exact date. Long-term money is the stuff you will not touch for fifteen years or more, most often your retirement, and it has the luxury of being able to ride out bad years because it has so many good years ahead of it.