ISA or Regular Saver?

innovate

Most regular saver lock your money up for 12 months, with either no early withdrawal, or massive penalties for early withdrawal.

Thus, if you start a Reg Saver now, you would not sensibly be able to put the saved money into an ISA this financial year.

DeanMB

innovate wrote: »

Most regular saver lock your money up for 12 months, with either no early withdrawal, or massive penalties for early withdrawal.

Thus, if you start a Reg Saver now, you would not sensibly be able to put the saved money into an ISA this financial year.

Sorry, I'm a complete newbie when it comes to this stuff.

What difference would that make to me? I'm basically trying to see if there's a safe alternative that's able to make me more than an ISA..

innovate

If you do want to make use of your current year's cash ISA limit, it's obviously no good to put your money into a Regular Saver that you cannot withdraw from until after April 5 2014.

If you don't care about making use of your current year's ISA allowance, it obviously doesn't matter.

However, unused ISA allowances cannot be carried forward to the new financial year.

atush

Basically, regualr savers can pay more than cash isas. So, you can get the best of both worlds by saving into one (with new money not your old ISA) and then putting the lot when it matures into next years isa.

What are your plans for the money? When will it be needed? you can t really start to think about investing it, unless you have a separate emergency cash fund, and you wont need the money for 5 years or more. If you are not sure when/what it will be spent on, and you have a cash buffer, you can think about investing it.

DeanMB

atush wrote: »

Basically, regualr savers can pay more than cash isas. So, you can get the best of both worlds by saving into one (with new money not your old ISA) and then putting the lot when it matures into next years isa.

What are your plans for the money? When will it be needed? you can t really start to think about investing it, unless you have a separate emergency cash fund, and you wont need the money for 5 years or more. If you are not sure when/what it will be spent on, and you have a cash buffer, you can think about investing it.

Thanks atush, I've decided that I'm going to use a Nationwide current account and treat it as my ISA, keeping my old money in there to take advantage of the interest rate. Alongside this I'm going to open an ISA for my monthly saving that I already do. At the end of the year I'm going to dump the money from the current account into this ISA to max out my ISA limit which I won't have used as I don't earn enough.

Eventually, I want to become a landlord. This won't happen for a few years yet though so I'll build my deposit for now and keep moving pennies around to get the most interest..

I opened another thread here with more information about my intentions for the accounts.