Sophie recently invested £44,000 at 0% over 10 years. We were so grateful, and caught up with her to learn more about her reasons for investing. Here’s what she had to say.
“When my mum died, I found myself confronting a language I’d never really had to speak before. Until then, money conversations had mostly been about rent, a subscription here or there, too many meal deals in a week, and a student loan too large to think about.
“My mum’s death brought me face to face with the reality of our different financial experiences. She was a middle-class boomer who worked as a teacher throughout her life and, when she died, left my sister and me an inheritance of £100,000 each. Alongside the grief came a new question: not only what this inheritance could do for me, but what it could do for others. It prompted me to think as much about responsibility as security.
“Using part of my mum’s pension, I invested £44,000 as loan stock in Collective Ownership. It felt like a way of honouring her lifetime of public service while also questioning what we mean by a “safe” investment. Conventional investments are often considered safe because they promise financial growth, but I wanted to invest in something that could also grow community, opportunity and shared prosperity. At a time when housing in many of our cities is increasingly treated as an investment asset rather than a basic need, fuelling landlordism and pushing secure, affordable homes out of reach, investing in Collective Ownership felt like a way to support a different future, one where housing strengthens communities instead of extracting wealth from them.
“For me, investing in Collective Ownership wasn’t simply a financial decision. It was a chance to turn inherited wealth into shared possibility, to imagine that our savings and pensions (or the parents we lose, in my case) can do more than accumulate value and instead help build the kinds of futures that put community at the centre.”
