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The advice is often to start investing early, when you have decades of growth and compound interest ahead of you. But former NHS worker Tessa Martin, 62, has shown that you can still turn a healthy profit in later life.
Martin, who has 14 grandchildren and lives in Ottershaw, Surrey, only started investing five years ago but estimates that her shares in the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Rolls-Royce have earned her about £20,000 to supplement her NHS pension.
When the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, decided to cut the annual tax-free cash Isa limit from £20,000 to £12,000 from next April for those aged under 65, her message was clear: investing is for the young. But a survey for The Times suggests that financial confidence rises with age, with 87 per cent of over-65s feeling confident about managing their money, savings and investments, compared with 59 per cent of those aged 18 to 24.
Our new Smarter with Money campaign is calling for more financial education in schools, with the aim of creating a million more investors — growing our own wealth, as well as the national economy.
Investing in retirement
Martin, who has five children, started work as a nurse at 36, when her youngest child was ten. Before then she had a number of part-time jobs that fitted around her young family, having left school at the age of 16.
One of her children was born with a heart condition, which inspired her to start her nursing training, qualifying in October 1999 and working her way up to be a ward manager. An operation on her hand meant she retired after 23 years at the age of 59 — a year earlier than planned. She used the tax-free lump sum from her pension and an inheritance payout to pay off the mortgage on her two-bedroom semi-detached home that she shares with her partner.
“It was a good career, and I went out on a high,” she said. “My mum died in her sixties, and all she wanted to do was retire and run a Bed and Breakfast place, but she didn’t make it because she had a brain tumour. It really changes how you feel about things. Life is too short — if you want to do something, do it.”
From bitcoin to Netflix
Martin first heard about investing from a colleague at work, and started out by putting a few hundred pounds into bitcoin through the trading platform eToro in 2021. She found bitcoin too volatile, though, so decided to change her approach. She has held shares in Amazon, Apple and Netflix, but the investment that has performed best for her was Rolls-Royce. She says her biggest mistake was investing in Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that soared in value in 2021, only to plummet. But because she doesn’t invest too heavily in one particular thing, she lost only about £300.
Martin has five children and 14 grandchildren
COLLECT
She said: “When you are new and a woman, people think you won’t understand. Listening to people at the beginning was probably where I went the most wrong.”
She increased the amount she had invested after retiring in 2022 and getting her lump sum. Her main source of income is her NHS pension, which pays £1,300 a month. She is still several years away from getting the state pension.
Martin estimates she has invested £10,000 of her own money and tripled its value, making her a profit of £20,000. She took out money to pay for her son’s wedding, her membership at a local spa and to replace her car when it was stolen last year.
She always keeps £10,000 invested and takes out any money that she earns above this. She said she beat the performance of the American S&P 500 Index of stocks by 43 per cent in 2025. She said: “I had one investment for 30 hours. That went up 40 per cent overnight — I was very lucky — and I sold out the next day.”
• ‘No one is taking it away, nobody’s taxing it’: why women are buying gold
The difference between the amount invested by men and women in the UK is about £678 billion, roughly the size of Switzerland’s economy, according to eToro and the advice website Boring Money. But separate research by Warwick Business School found that women who do invest outperform men by nearly 2 per cent a year.
And Martin is proof that it’s never to late to get started. Life expectancy in the UK is 83 for women, and 79 for men, which means that someone who started investing in their sixties still has two decades of growth to enjoy.
Dan Moczulski from eToro said: “We see time and again that many women come to investing later in life with exactly the qualities that matter most: patience, discipline, and a long-term mindset.”
Not without risk
Investing in individual stocks and shares is not without risk because share prices can be influenced by many different economic factors. First-time investors may find that funds are a better starting point. The money invested in a fund is pooled together and managed, either by a professional human stockpicker or a computer, to buy different assets, which means that the risk is spread across many holdings.
• Why Britain cannot afford to be a nation of savers
Older people who are making their own investment decisions for the first time need to think about their financial situation, risk tolerance and life expectancy. Take some time to research a company before investing, or choose a fund that does not need you to make any portfolio decisions.
Dan Coatsworth from the investment firm AJ Bell said: “It’s never too late to invest. Many people will have experience with investing, even if they don’t realise it. That’s because the money you pay into a pension will inevitably be invested in the financial markets.”