Investing with Santander Portfolio - have i wasted money? (long post)

srcandas

royal23 wrote: »

where should I go and open one? Hargreaves Lansdown?
would cost me £24p.a. (£2pm fee per fund, but only one fund).

any quick advice would be great

Sadly the world is changing so today it may be £24 tomorrow who knows?

But you need to consider how you will use the facility in the future (just Vanguard) ?
You need to consider if longevity of supplier, site security, analytic facilities, good share spreads, convenient tax reporting, .... are important. They all could be.

Personally I'm with HL for SIPP and unwrapped and am very happy but all the above considerations have some importance to me.

Well done with the action you have taken. Doing nothing would have been a soft easy route. Making positive decisions is tough.

Also don't be in a rush. That £18000 will not melt away if you take two months to decide what to do. And who knows you may find a better buying opportunity in that time. Good Luck :beer:

grey_gym_sock

i think HL are the cheapest when you only want 1 vanguard fund. and they generally efficient.

(full disclosure: i own some shares in HL )

royal23

great, thanks guys!

i acutally just rang HL, very friendly customer support.

they told me i CAN open a S/S ISA still this year, because i cancelled the santander one within 14 days, so it's as if that never existed.

srcandas wrote: »

Sadly the world is changing so today it may be £24 tomorrow who knows?

But you need to consider how you will use the facility in the future (just Vanguard) ?
You need to consider if longevity of supplier, site security, analytic facilities, good share spreads, convenient tax reporting, .... are important. They all could be.

right, i read that they haven't fully changed in compliance to RDR, correct?
for now (meaning next 5 years) i will only have index funds, not interested in individual stocks. that may be vanguard LifeStrategy for now, and maybe a small portfolio of other trackers later (where no £2 applies).

now i just need to think about this:
i want to use up my ISA allowance, so i would open an ISA and an unwrapped with HL for example. But having two pots means i own two funds, so the total will already be £48 for the two Vang LifeStrat funds...

jem16

royal23 wrote: »

they told me i CAN open a S/S ISA still this year, because i cancelled the santander one within 14 days, so it's as if that never existed.

You can certainly use your S&S ISA for this year as I said earlier. However it's the extra £7k that was transferring over from the cash ISA that's the issue.

Technically Santander should have put you back in the position you were in before the investment so that £7k should have gone back into the cash ISA allowing you to transfer it agian should you want to.

Did you ask them about this?

royal23

jem16 wrote: »

You can certainly use your S&S ISA for this year as I said earlier. However it's the extra £7k that was transferring over from the cash ISA that's the issue.

Technically Santander should have put you back in the position you were in before the investment so that £7k should have gone back into the cash ISA allowing you to transfer it agian should you want to.

Did you ask them about this?

yes, when i called them on thursday they said the money cannot go back into the CASH isa, once it was transferred out.
i will ring them now and enquire about this.

jem16

royal23 wrote: »

yes, when i called them on thursday they said the money cannot go back into the CASH isa, once it was transferred out.
i will ring them now and enquire about this.

It seems they are right. If the money has moved out of the cash ISA into the S&S ISA before you cancelled, it cannot be moved back to the cash ISA.

However my reading of the rules here seems to imply that you can still use your full £18k with another provider as long as Santander did indeed cancel it under the cooling off agreement and not simply closed it.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/isa/bulletin15.htm

royal23

jem16 wrote: »

It seems they are right. If the money has moved out of the cash ISA into the S&S ISA before you cancelled, it cannot be moved back to the cash ISA.

However my reading of the rules here seems to imply that you can still use your full £18k with another provider as long as Santander did indeed cancel it under the cooling off agreement and not simply closed it.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/isa/bulletin15.htm

i just got off the phone with them; they first said it's not possible to transfer back into cash isa, but they have put an investigation in place now... let's see if it works.

just to be clear: the 18K total i mention was made up of
-7,000 transfer from Cash ISA into the new SS ISA
-5,640 additional into the new SS ISA, i.e. this year's allowance i hadn't used yet
- 5,360 into the non-ISA OEIC

if i can get the 7K back into my cash isa, i'm happy. if not, then i have to just live with it

royal23

Update 17/7:
santander transferred the £7,000 back into my cash isa! yay!
when i spoke to them on the phone they first said that this isn't possible, but i kept asking for it, so they started an investigation and when i logged into online banking this morning i could see a transfer were made (from my esaver where i had the money parked into my cash isa)
pretty happy about this.

so, when i took up santander's investment product, which is now cancelled, they upgraded my cash isa to a super isa at 4% interest.
now i'm just hoping, praying, that they won't switch it back
but that would be too good to be true, i'm sure they will revert it to the standard 3.3% interest.

as for investments, i'm pretty much 99% decided now that i'll open an account with HL and get the vanguard lifestrategy 80% fund.
i'll open both an ISA and an unwrapped account, so i'll have two funds and both will cost me the platform charge, but that's ok.