Family Investsments - have you heard about them??

Lynn11

I have a CTF (child trust fund) for my daughter which I opened up with Abbey 2yrs ago. Just received a letter stating that they are passing all CTF to Family Investments and from November we will be dealing with them.

Has any heard of them? I am unsure whether to continue this or change to another provider where if I want to add to this then I can via branch rather than sending a cheque or bank transfer.

Any ideas. Thanks

Lansdowne

Family Investments aka Family Assurance is a specialist provider of these kind of product. They are the suppliers of some of the Post Office ISAs etc so hopefully are well regarded.

http://www.family.co.uk/ if you want to look them up.

simon_templar_2

FI are a govt approved/recommended one according to the product/application leaflet

barak

Caution may be needed. I'm not sure why other institutions are using Family Assurance for their CTFs. Perhaps CTFs are not 'big' enough to be of real interest to them.

I know nothing about CTFs, but Family Assurance is a Friendly Society. Friendly Societies were in the past always known for high charges and I have never used one.

Hopefully dunstonh will comment on the relevance of this to CTFs.

He has commented on Friendly Societies elsewhere -

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1440209&highlight=friendly+societies

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=7926061#post7926061

opinions4u

barak wrote: »

Caution may be needed. I'm not sure why other institutions are using Family Assurance for their CTFs. Perhaps CTFs are not 'big' enough to be of real interest to them.

CTFs have high compliance costs for institutions and low deposit values. Looks like Abbey have decided to get out of the market because it isn't profitable.

I know nothing about CTFs, but Family Assurance is a Friendly Society. Friendly Societies were in the past always known for high charges and I have never used one.

I think the OP needs to look carefully at what the charges are and what they will become with the new provider. Consider switching if appropriate.

Reaper

barak wrote: »

I know nothing about CTFs, but Family Assurance is a Friendly Society. Friendly Societies were in the past always known for high charges

To be fair you are thinking of the investment bonds which only friendly societies are allowed to sell. These sound apealing because they are "tax free" but, because they are restricted to low premiums, the charges work out high as a percentage of the value.

However they also sell other products such as stocks and shares ISAs and CTF.

It is not surprising that companies are selling CTF policies to them as they are used to high volumes of small value policies which are of little interest to the big boys.