DO you find it difficult to save cash? Try the ‘quiet treat’ investment trick – it could make you thousands of pounds better off.
It’s perfect for those who catch themselves making little splurges, like a cheeky Friday night takeaway or a trip to the nail salon. But with this three-step investment hack, you could use that cash to grow a nest egg which could be worth £6.1k instead – here’s how.

If you are a guilty pleasure shopper, we explain how to get your money working harder for you with a savvy three-step investment trick Credit: Getty

You could use your cash to grow a nest egg worth £7k with our three-step investment trick Credit: Getty
Essentially, investing is the best way to make your money work harder for you.
Studies show that there’s a 90% chance of making more money investing in the stock market when you do so for the long-term, rather than leaving it in a savings account.
A great way to get started investing is by following the ‘quiet treat’ trick.
This involves cutting back on treats that don’t cost the earth and feel insignificant – so you forget you’ve splashed the cash on them.

That could be anything from a takeout coffee, a new top for the weekend, or that nice new cushion for the sofa.
But with our three-step hack, you could potentially build a nest egg worth thousands.
But remember, just because an investment has performed well – or badly – in the past, doesn’t mean you are guaranteed the same return in the future.
Investing in individual stocks is risky, so only invest what you can afford.

Here, we explain exactly how to do it – including the formula to use to save thousands over a three year period AND still treat yourself too…
Step one – the account you NEED to open
You might think you need to be rich to invest, but you don’t. 
Many investment apps will let you get started with just £1. If you want to set up a direct debit into your account though, you’ll usually need at least £25 a month to spare.
Your first step is to open a stocks and shares Isa.
An Isa is a special savings account where the money you’ve earned from interest or made from your investments is tax-free, and you can save £20,000 a year into them.
There are plenty of websites and apps to choose from – Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell, for example.
Check out customer reviews to see how easy the platform is to use, and pick one with low fees so you can keep more money in your pocket.
You should only invest if you have three to six months of outgoings saved up in an emergency fund, and are prepared to leave your money invested for at least five years.
This is so you have time to build your money back up if your investments drop after market dips.

What are the risks?

BEFORE you start investing, you need to understand the risks.

The return you make will depend on how much you invest and where you put your money.
As we have seen recently, the stock market can dramatically fall.
The US market recently saw its biggest drop since the start of the Covid pandemic after President Donald Trump announced plans to introduce punitive tariffs on goods imported from other countries.
The UK’s own stock market, the FTSE 100, fell by more than 10 per cent after the news. 
You must be prepared to lose it all – so only invest money you can afford to sacrifice.
You need to be willing to invest cash for at least five years to mitigate any dips and allow your money to recover. If you can’t afford to lock up your money for this long, investing may not be right for you.
It’s usually better to drip feed money into your investments instead of putting down a big chunk of money in one go.
Before you start investing, experts say you should have a minimum of six months’ of wages in a savings account

Step two – the budgeting trick to use
THe good news is you don’t have to cancel out all your guilty spending – you can STILL treat yourself with our trick.

The key is to budget for your guilty pleasures.
If you’re wondering how to do that, then sit down and look at how much you spend on treats you don’t need.
Set an amount for how much you want to spend on that treat per month, and see how much money you’ll be saving – stash it into your stocks and shares Isa instead.
Using a bank account where you can set limits on your spending is a good idea.
For example, Snoop lets you set spending targets and sends alerts to help you stay in your budget. 

‘I quit buying takeaway coffees and started micro-investing with just £1.50 a day’

DESPITE having spent the past 20 years writing about money, Lucy Tobin hasn’t been big on investing… until now.

Mum-of-three Lucy, who has two sons aged 11 and nine and a daughter, six, started following the new ‘micro-investing’ trend and estimates it could help make her nearly £16k richer.
Micro-investing is where you invest small amounts of money regularly.
She decided to invest £30 over one month, or £1.50 each weekday during May.
She gave up buying takeout coffees over the month to invest in stocks instead.
Her first step was to open a stocks and shares Isa. She picked Plum because she got £10 free cashback for opening an account with them, and found its app easy to use.
Next, she set about picking 18 companies to invest in over the month.
Experts call this diversification: spreading your risk, but not betting all your money on one stock.
Her top performers were Virgin Galactic, Spotify, Goldman Sachs and TripAdvisor.
By the end of May, her £30 was worth £31.71.
That doesn’t sound much, but experts at Finder said if she kept investing every weekday for a decade in her companies, she would put in a total of £2,600 of her own cash, but could grow a pot worth £15,596.
Read her full story here.

Step three – how to invest
So how much could you save?
We crunch the numbers for you based on calculations by the investment management firm 7IM.
Here’s how much you cut have if you cut back expenditure on your guilty pleasures back and invested that money instead.
McDonald’s – you’d now have: £1,520

Love a Maccies? Investing in a fund, which is like a shopping basket of different investments, could be the right way to go Credit: Alamy
Love a Big Mac or Filet-o-fish? 

Spending £15 a fortnight at the golden arches racks up to £390 a year. 
But what happens if you bought shares in McDonald’s instead?
When you buy shares in a company, you own a small slice of the firm.
But if you invested £390 a year in McDonald’s shares for the past three years, you would have put in a total of £1,170 of your own money and seen your money grow to £1,158. That’s a loss of £12.
Investing in individual stocks like McDonald’s is risky because you are relying on the fortunes of one company to grow your money. 
That’s why you could consider investing in a fund instead.
A fund is a bit like a shopping basket full of many different investments – so, not just in different companies, but in other types of assets like gold, or bonds (a type of loan).
The Vanguard FTSE all-World ETF is a fund that  invests in more than 3,700 companies across the globe, one of which is McDonald’s. 
It’s super popular, because it spreads your money across so many different stocks is known as diversification. 
It can be a good investment strategy because it means that if one of the shares takes a dip, others that have performed better should offset the loss to give you steady returns over the long-term. 

If you had invested your £390 a year into this fund for the past three years, you would now have £1,520 over three years, a profit of £35, although if you had invested over five years, you would have £2,888 which is a profit of £938.
This shows how, with investing, your money can go up and down over time – so make sure you are comfortable with the risk.
Amazon hauls – you’d now have: £2,429

Amazon is a marketplace titan – it continues to grow and could be worth investing in Credit: Reuters
It’s easy to splash your cash on Amazon – you can get anything from hairdryers to clothes and books.
Say you spent £50 on the site every month. 
Investing that amount in Amazon shares for the past three years instead would mean your pot would now be worth £2,429 – £1,800 of which is your own money and £629 in profit.
Amazon is one of the biggest companies on the planet, worth almost £2 trillion, and continues to rocket in growth.
In its latest results it reported profits of £67.5 billion, up an incredible 37% from the year before. 
Trainers – you’d now have: £442

Sports Direct is great for bagging a bargain pair of trainers, but had you invested your cash instead over the past three years, you’d now have £442 Credit: PA
There’s nothing better than a new pair of trainers. But do you really need that second or third pair?

You could invest that money instead into Fraser Group, which owns the sportswear retailer Sports Direct.
If you had invested £100 a year over three years, you would have £442.
Of that, £142 would be money made from investment growth.
The good thing about Frasers Group is that it owns high street stalwarts including Game, House of Fraser and Evans Cycles, which means investors in the stock aren’t just relying on the fortunes on one chain for their returns. 
In its latest company results, Frasers said UK Sports, the division which includes Sports Direct, had seen profits increase by 17.6 per cent to £559million over the past year. 
It increased the numbers of stores from 785 to 794, bucking the trend which is seeing many retailers shut stores across the UK.
Nando’s – you’d now have: £1,249

Nando’s is a private company so you can’t invest directly in it – so consider the FTSE 100 Credit: Alamy
Everyone loves a cheeky Friday night Nando’s.
You can’t buy shares in Nando’s because it’s a private company.
But if you stashed £25 a month – enough for a takeaway – into the UK stock market, the FTSE 100, instead, you’d have invested £900 over three years of your own money and your pot would have grown to a total of £1,249 – meaning you’d have made almost £349 profit.

The FTSE 100 is sometimes thought of as a boring place to invest, because it doesn’t have any of the exciting technology names you find on the US stock market like Meta and Alphabet.  
But it has grown steadily over time and is home to some huge multi-national companies including Unilever, which makes Marmite and Domestos, as well as big banks like HSBC and LLoyds, and high street stalwarts like M&S. 
Holiday nails – you’d now have: £483

Love getting your nails done? Consider investing into the FTSE Index World instead – you would have made £261 in profit over the last three years Credit: Reuters
Going on holiday? Getting party season ready? There’s always an occasion for a new set of nails.
Getting yours done can easily cost £40 a pop. If you went to the salon four times a year, that’s £160.
If you had instead invested £160 into the shares of the beauty giant L’Oreal you could have made more money – perhaps keeping a bit back to buy a new nail varnish instead.
If you’d put that amount into the shares each year for three years, you’d have invested £480 and have just slightly more at £483, but over five years, you’d have invested £800 but now have £860 – a profit of £60.