FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dublin, 2026 — MoneyWhizz, the financial education initiative founded by Frank Conway QFA, today announced the release of Save, Invest, or Speculate, a new guide written for anyone aged 16 and up who wants to understand what saving, investing and speculating actually mean — and what each one costs and delivers in Ireland today.
The guide is being made available to clients ahead of MoneyWhizz’s autumn seminar series.
Table of Contents
Why now
Most people were never taught the difference between the three. They’re told shares are “risky” and deposits are “safe,” and left to work it out from advertising, headlines, or whatever a friend did once. The result: money that should be growing sits idle in cash for decades, while money that should be untouchable gets put into something that was never an investment at all.
Save, Invest, or Speculate sets the three ideas out in plain language, using ten real years of market and inflation data, then follows the story through to the part most guides skip entirely: what Irish tax does to the result, and how that compares with the UK, Germany, the US and the Netherlands.
What it covers
- The real difference between saving (certainty) and investing (growth) — and why both jobs matter
- Inflation as “the risk that never shows up as a falling number,” illustrated with a decade of grocery prices
- How compounding actually builds wealth, worked line by line
- A risk hierarchy from cash to crypto, with a short self-assessment
- Why crypto and commodities are speculation, not investment — and why that’s not a moral judgement, just an arithmetic one
- A plain-English walkthrough of Ireland’s exit tax, the eight-year deemed disposal rule, and what it quietly costs long-term compounding
- Practical steps for opening an account safely, and a clear list of scam warning signs
Things we’re flagging to clients directly
The pension doesn’t stop mattering. Nothing in this guide changes the basic order of operations: clear expensive debt, build an emergency fund, take any employer pension match on offer, then invest. That sequence is unaffected by any of the tax or product changes discussed below — and pensions remain the most tax-efficient wrapper available to Irish savers.
A new Irish investment account may be coming — and it is not a government handout. There is genuine, ongoing discussion in Dáil and Department of Finance circles about a dedicated retail investment account, and the exit tax has already fallen from 41% to 38%. We want to head off a specific misunderstanding before it takes hold: some clients are already drawing a mental line to the SSIA scheme from the early 2000s, where the State topped up personal contributions directly. Nothing proposed works that way. Any new account would be a tax wrapper — it changes how growth is taxed, not who is putting money in. Treat every figure currently circulating as speculation until a Finance Act says otherwise.
Fraud is not going away — it’s adapting. As awareness of legitimate products grows, so does the sophistication of scams built to mimic them. Expect fraudsters to reference “new government investment schemes” specifically, precisely because the real conversation is public. The guide’s checklist — guaranteed returns, manufactured urgency, unsolicited contact, unregulated firms, and pressure to pay by transfer or crypto — is worth repeating at every seminar this year, not just once.
Availability
Risk literacy is the real gap. Many people can recite that “shares are risky,” but far fewer can explain what that risk actually is, how it differs from the risk of holding cash, or how diversification changes the picture. This guide treats risk as something to be tiered and managed — not avoided.
Save, Invest, or Speculate is available now to MoneyWhizz seminar clients and at www.moneywhizz.org. It is financial education, not financial advice, and recommends no specific product, fund or provider.
Media contact: Frank Conway QFA Founder, MoneyWhizz www.moneywhizz.org. info@moneywhizz.org
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