If you are nervous about the stock market, one way of starting on your journey is to buy a tracker that tracks the major indices. If you can choose when to sell you will not lose any money, as major markets in the long run go up, partly to inflation. There will be plenty of thick and thin, so when the markets are falling it may be best to have a modest yield to add to your Snowball.

With markets near to all time highs it’s a very dangerous time to buy a tracker.

Here, you would have doubled your money and the variable dividend re-invested into a higher yielder would have added to your Snowball. What appeared at the time to be a high risk purchase, in fact turned out to be a low risk purchase.