When it comes to financial planning, the terms ‘saving’ and ‘investing’ are often used interchangeably. While both saving and investing are important, they serve different purposes and there’s a big difference between the two.  Saving is when you set aside money into a safe, low-risk regular account. This is usually done with the aim of making sure you have cash available for a specific goal e.g. for a first house deposit, a travelling trip, or just a rainy day fund in the case of an emergency. Investing, on the other hand, is when you use your money to purchase assets such as stocks, shares or bonds in the hope of achieving long-term growth. Investing comes with much more risk and your money can easily decrease, as well as increase. However, over the long-term you hope to see good growth. This blog post is about regular savings accounts. The more low-risk variety with guaranteed interest rates that make saving easy and completely passive. You can also open cash ISAs which serve this purpose too and allow tax-free savings.