Ndubuisi Egwim compares a senior NHS doctor's buy-to-let property investment against putting the same £10,000 deposit and monthly payments into an index fund ISA. A Moneywise Doctor Community post sparked the analysis: a property bought for £100,000 now exceeds $200K, but no one had run the actual numbers to see which strategy won.
what prompted this analysis. I didn't just wake up and say I want to find out which one will do better. So I have got a community, the Moneywise Doctor Community, where over 1,000 doctors come together on their journey to financial independence. So a senior NHS doctor in that community shared something that stopped the whole thread of discussion. She said, years ago I bought a property for about £100,000. I put down £10,000 deposit. I have been renting it out ever since, paying down the monthly mortgage month by month. It's now worth significantly more. On the surface, it looks like a good decision. It's over $200K now. I recently attended the Moneywise Dr. Investing Academy and learned more about investing in the stock market, particularly index funds and the ISA wrapper SIPP. And I started wondering, what if I had taken the same $10K deposit and invested it differently? What if instead of a buy-to-let, she had put it into a globally diversified index fund inside a stock and shares ISA? And what if every month, instead of a monthly mortgage payment going to the bank, that same amount had gone into her ISA? So we use ISAs to keep it simple. What would the numbers look like today? She did not have the data. Neither did most of the doctors in the thread. So I decided I'm going to take a bit of time and run it properly with real numbers, real tax treatment, real costs that most comparisons conveniently leave out.
