SIPP, Hargreaves Lansdown and Funds

LongTermLurker

jamesd wrote: »

Hopefully at least one of your employment-related deals had low charges. My limited experience is one with very high charges and one with lowest possible charges for 100 or so investment options but more expensive for a broad range.

Hargreaves Lansdown look pretty competitive for pension pots below say 50k when there's a desire to use a lot of non-pension company funds. Sometimes for larger pots as well, depends on what they are being comapred to.

The basic charges are all pretty similar - around 1% give or take, but most of the funds available for that are pretty bland looking. To use something more interesting costs up to 0.9% more, so I try to use the most interesting looking internal funds and add a couple of external ones. From what I've read, they're not the worst providers I could have ended up with anyway

EagerLearner

Thanks EdInvestor, I'll take another look at Halifax over the comng weeks/months. Shame it seems their site is so messy though...

In terms of this years Fund ISA it's been merged with last years now, so I can easily set up another £50 a month or so to go to a different fund. This again is because in 2-3 years if we need the cash we can still get to it for a deposit, rather than the SIPP. We are already maxed on both our Cash ISA's and I hear so often that equities are better than cash over a few years...

jamesd

EagerLearner, then you may not have a 1,000 minumum investment problem. The minimum lump sum investment for a single fund purchase in their Vantage fund and share account (same thing) is 250 Pounds. You can use the buy, then sell and split up to five ways option to get less than that if desired.

The S&S ISA does have a 1,000 minimum, same sell split workaround.

EagerLearner

Thanks jamesd - it's a shame as it used to be less than that - I used to be able to do an online upload of cash to the account, then call and invest £50 or £100 to my existing funds as needed. They have now stopped that and it has to be £250 minimum, often more, and sometimes only if I call on the 11th of the month so they can batch invest. So we have pretty much stopped investing as I wanted to do it as and when I had some spare cash rather than direct debit every month. This way we'll just save up and decide...

You can use the buy, then sell and split up to five ways option to get less than that if desired.

Sorry - way over my head that one - what does this entail?

jamesd

Buy something. Choose to sell some and you're given the option to buy other things with the money you get for what you sell. You can select up to five other things.

EagerLearner

jamesd that sounds an interesting option - will it not cost me more in fees though (buying then selling straight away)? Sorry - just want to double check as have not done it before... otherwise sounds like a perfect plan which I would probably have been too wary to try.

jamesd

There's often a small difference between buying and selling price even where all of the initial commission is refunded, due to the creation costs of new units. Would probably cost you a few Pounds .

For example, one thousand Pounds worth of BlackRock UK Absolute Alpha purchased on the morning of the 29th might have cost 118.5p each while the daily price on the 28th was 118.1p and on the 29th 118.2p. So the first valuation would be at 118.2p and the total value after the purchase would be £997.47. That's a loss due to unit creation costs of 2.53 for £1,000, or 0.25%.

MollyCoddle_2

Anybody know if a Vantage SIPP allows cash to be kept in a Building Society Bond? (certificates, or whatever else they may be called, anything with a tied in period extending out to 5 years). HMRC allow these within a SIPP!

These bear higher interest rates than the HL cash interest structure for the SIPP.

Thanks,

MC

stphnstevey

My brother suggested a SIPP for holding cash (we would use it to extract money from a Limited company via company pension payments), rather than investing post-tax £ in an cash ISA. Can anyone see any pittfalls in using Hargreaves and Lansdown's SIPP to do this?

EagerLearner

Hi there I am female and 32 and wondered if the following selection is roughly what you might expect:

£70 to Invesco Perpetual Pension Equity fund
£50 to Neptune Balanced
£40 to Jupiter India
£40 to Neptune Global Equity

I had tried to be as varied as possible, however, I am now considering reducing this to 2 or 3 funds only and changing the amounts respectively to simplify things. Which would you ditch with a 35 year view?

Also as recommended on here, I could then maybe change it from a SIPP to a stakeholder or a personal pension to reduce fees?