Hallifax advised me their own product is crap!

jennifernil

large_satsuma wrote: »

But what do you mean by "elsewhere"? This is the bit that's driving me crazy!

I'm planning to start a cash ISA in the next few days, using my full tax-year allowance. I may pay a bit into my investment ISA, but am unwilling to tie up too much in a longterm/ risky area. My partner is doing all this also.

So what do I do with the rest of my savings? I was recently made redundant, so I have a reasonable pot. If a regular saver is "inappropriate", then what?

You are making a good start with the cash ISA, I think Icesave is one of the better ones at present.

We have some money from a pension lump sum which we do not need immediately so we have put it into a 6 month fixed term fixed rate account. This might be appropriate for you too. You can also get longer terms.

If you don't want to tie it up at all then there are several banks offering over 6% gross , you can get info about them by looking on here or on some of the comparison sites.

Do be careful as some of them have conditions on withdrawals, and some make up the rate with a short term bonus.

Paul_Herring

debbie42 wrote: »

An over-zealous filter at work there. One of my friends works for a school pc network and their filter stopped pupils from visiting anything that had the words "sex" in. This ruled out rather a lot of council websites such as Sussex, Essex etc.

Were they able to research S!!!!horpe and Peniston council websites?

Edit: Oh bother! The forum software spotted the first one...

debbie42

Paul_Herring wrote: »

Were they able to research S!!!!horpe and Peniston council websites?

I've no doubt some schoolchildren tried looking .

I know it's childish but it's awfully tempting to see what the filter here picks up, I mean these letter combinations must occur fairly often in innoccuous words that we'd never normally notice before the exclamation marks highlight it. I'm trying to resist!

LongTermLurker

Paul_Herring wrote: »

Were they able to research S!!!!horpe and Peniston council websites?

...and while off-topic, how about the wonderfully-named Orkney village of Tw*tt? Could you imagine living there?? (Must be a Viking word, apparantly there's a Shetland Tw*tt as well :rolleyes:

You beat me to the S'thorpe one btw :mad:

large_satsuma

I try not to use the "ejaculation" in Chorlton-"ejeculation"-Hardy. I get embarrassed just writing it.

LongTermLurker

jennifernil wrote: »

You cannot "take advantage" of the 10% RS with a "scary lump sum" as it is what it says.......a regular saving scheme with a max £500 pm deposit.
So if you have a lump sum you need to put it elsewhere. This of course does not mean that you cannot also open a RS.

Yes you can, though I don't do it. There are many, many posts about feeding £500pm from a 6.5% no notice account into the (possibly 12%) Halifax RS account. Taking a £6000 starting sum, the principle is that you end up with an average of 6.5% for 5.5 months and 12% for 6.5 months - the feeding raises your average interest rate from 6.5%

Edit - sorry, had to dash and have now come back and found the link I'd been looking for:

Originally Posted by YorkshireBoy
£6,000 x 12% / 12 x 6.5 = £390.00
£6,000 x 6.5% / 12 x 5.5 = £178.75

So the average at the higher 12% rate = £568.75 = 9.5%

At the normal 10% rate:

£6,000 x 10% / 12 x 6.5 = £325.00
£6,000 x 6.5% / 12 x 5.5 = £178.75

Interest = £503.75 = average 8.4%

kg87

debbie42 wrote: »

If you pay tax at 20% then you'd net 8% with the Halifax Regular Saver. If you pay it at 40% it would net down to 6%. So, it depends on your circumstances: there are cash ISAs around that pay over 6%..

This is exactly what I worked out as well, surely that means if you're a basic taxpayer, then it's better to get the Halifax Regular Saver than a Cash ISA cos you get back more interest...

jennifernil

LongTermLurker wrote: »

Yes you can, though I don't do it. There are many, many posts about feeding £500pm from a 6.5% no notice account into the (possibly 12%) Halifax RS account. Taking a £6000 starting sum, the principle is that you end up with an average of 6.5% for 5.5 months and 12% for 6.5 months - the feeding raises your average interest rate from 6.5%

Edit - sorry, had to dash and have now come back and found the link I'd been looking for:
So the average at the higher 12% rate = £568.75 = 9.5%

At the normal 10% rate:

£6,000 x 10% / 12 x 6.5 = £325.00
£6,000 x 6.5% / 12 x 5.5 = £178.75

Interest = £503.75 = average 8.4%

I would not call that "taking advantage", just being astute!!

LongTermLurker

jennifernil wrote: »

I would not call that "taking advantage", just being astute!!

Indeed astute, but if something is available to you and you avail yourself of it, you have taken advantage of the opportunity, by definition.

I don't think the intention was to take advantage in the same way that you may take advantage of someone's mis-fortune, for example.

regularsaver1

dunstonh wrote: »

I'm speechless. That doesnt happen often does it Your post was spot on LTL.

The Halifax sales rep has basically shown all the things that are wrong with tied salesforces. Low skilled advisers (who wont be able to be called advisers from next year), with low quality products trying to sell using dodgy sales tactics to low knowledge customers who wouldnt know good from bad.

Ok, not that speechless

i don't think this was a financial adviser - i think this was a bank adviser trying to get a lead for a financial adviser, as in book an appointments - which the banking advisers had targets to do with this account, otherwise a full financial report would have been done by financial adviser