confused ove isa transfer

buteman

I had an isa with nationwide last year and have just been notified that the bonus interest will cease on 30th June.

I decided to open a new one for which they are offering a bonus again and opted to transfer the cash from the old one into it.

I have just been reading martins notes about this and am confused about what this means:

Don't think of this as opening a new ISA, you're simply moving your old ISA into a new provider and can do this separately from opening a new account - providing you never put any money in it.
Imagine each ISA year's allowance is labelled 2008/9, 2007/8 etc. Once that year is finished you can't add any extra money to that year's ISA (except interest), yet any ISA that accepts transfers in will happily take everything labelled as an old tax year, and not count it as the current year's allowance.

Now I thought that as I had not got the full allowance in the old one I would be able to add more as and when I could afford to but the above seems to say i should not put money into it.
Can someone explain this please?

molerat

You cannot add any more to last year's allowance but you can transfer last year's to a new one and put this year's funds into this new one as well.

The above quote is about moving your old ISA and opening another one for the current year.

buteman

Ah great, thanks molerat
Having read it again I can see that makes sense.