Pensioners lump sum investment

Hi,

After my Father died, my Mother now has started receiving cheques from life assurance, investments that he had, and so far has received nearly 100k. There's more to come, but she's getting worried about just having it in the Post Office (terrible interest rate) and she's looking to put it either in one lump sum, or over several investments.

As she's a pensioner, she doesn't have to pay DIRT, but not sure if that's enough to make a purely deposit based investment worthwhile. The other thing is though, that as she's a pensioner, she doesn't want to invest in something that isn't going to make her money for 5+ years.

She has some other savings that she's using for day-to-day living, and between that and her pension she's hoping that she won't have to dip into the funds, but she still doesn't want to really invest too much in something that she'll need to leave for several years to avail of good returns just in case.

So, taking all that into account, it seems to cancel out a lot of the options that are posted in some of the key posts. Does anyone have any suggestions of what would be best for her.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Hi,
My own Mother is currently in very similar circumstances to your's. She has money to invest, but the problem is as she is 70 its hard to reccomend the stock market for investemnt as this is a longer term game. My question is does anyone know of any type of low to medium risk investment that could potentially give higher returns than a deposit account over a 3-5 year term?

Thanks in advance.

This may be a controversial sugestion but its my view that people are living for a much longer time statistically and if you expect to live longer than 5 years into the future (if the parents are in good health they probably will) then why not put a good percentage into a unit linked stock market fund ?
Someone who is 65 or 70 could expect to live another 20 years and during this time the capital built up over a lifetime will be constantly eroded and destroyed by inflation.