Alternative to Hargreaves Lansdown - Based on my portfolio (ISA and SIPP)

darren72

I currently hold a SIPP, ISA and Share account with Hargreaves Lansdown and have been very happy with the service I have received.

However, following on from their letter and notification of price changes, I am starting to realise that they are not very competitive for those with a portfolio of my size.

I'm getting very confused with the choice of companies to move to, and have looked at iii.co.uk, The Share Centre, ATS, AJ Bell, Cavendish, Clubfinance as well as many others.

Some of the companies allow shares to be held in the SIPP, and others don't. Some companies offer all the funds I have, others don't. All very confusing.

Then there is the consideration of exit fees - Some don't charge any at all (but are they the cheapest overall providers) ?

The choice and differing charges is overwhelming (to put it mildly).

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions, based on the portfolio's I hold.

ISA - £22,500.00
SIPP - £249,850.00
Share Account - £885.00

ISA - Name / Current Value (£)
Artemis Global Energy Acc 1,589.98
Artemis Strategic Assets Acc 1,459.69
Invesco Perpetual Corporate Bond Acc 2,975.80
Invesco Perpetual High Income Acc 5,703.82
Invesco Perpetual Income Acc 3,675.27
Jupiter Absolute Return Acc 1,846.17
Lazard Emerging Markets Acc 1,604.27
Royal London Sterling Extra Yield Bond Class B Income 3,388.78

SIPP - Name / Current Value (£)
BlackRock Gold & General Acc 6,100.53
Cazenove UK Smaller Companies Acc 17,954.85
First State Global Emerging Mkt Leaders Class A Acc 8,040.03
HL Multi-Manager Special Situations Trust Acc 10,922.90
Invesco Perpetual High Income Acc 27,051.58
Jupiter India Acc 6,078.97
Kames High Yield Bond Class A Retail Acc 7,111.24
Legal & General US Index Retail Acc 9,712.56
Legg Mason US Smaller Companies Acc 10,642.04
M&G Global Basics Class X Income 9,150.12
Neptune Russia & Greater Russia Class A Retail Acc 5,596.04
Newton Asian Income Inc 5,900.08
Newton Higher Income Inc 5,379.81
Old Mutual Global Best Ideas Acc 13,708.70
Royal London Corporate Bond Trust Class A Income 10,105.39
Royal London Sterling Extra Yield Bond Class B Income 13,321.90
Royal Mail PLC Ordinary GBP0.01 1,312.06 - Shares
Schroder Managed Balanced Class H Acc 10,225.51
Talktalk Telecom Group Plc Ord 0.1p 6,538.08 - Shares
Thomas Cook Group plc Ord Eur0.01 64,848.47 - Shares

Shares Account - Name / Current Value (£)
British Sky Broadcasting Ordinary 50p - 866.00

Any comments/recommendations/opinions on who to move to would really be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Darren

SnowMan

Given the size of your SIPP portfolio and that it is mainly fund based then you should probably be looking at moving your SIPP to the providers with fixed or materially capped charges so perhaps ATS (£186pa + dealing costs) or Interactive Investor (£144pa + dealing costs) unless you do a significant amount of selling and buying. That is the main action (and if you don't do this by 2nd June you are looking at an extra £400 region in exit fees to move your SIPP from HL otherwise). To state the obvious a 250K funds only SIPP portfolio incurs charges of over £1000pa with HL.

If you are moving to interactive investor then you might want to move your share account and ISA account there also. You might want to check with them whether their £80pa ISA/dealing account charge applies if you have a SIPP account as well, nobody is quite sure. But if it isn't waived you get 2 free trades a quarter in any case.

If you want to keep everything together then the new about to launch Trustnet direct platform could be a good bet as it has a capped £200pa + £144pa SIPP charge (£144pa charge waived for first year) + dealing costs.

You have some flexibility with your share account and ISA account, because the amounts in them are small and so most providers (apart from ATS) will be relatively similar and there are arguments for keeping them with a separate provider to your SIPP.

You can download my spreadsheet which may help crunching the numbers on platform costs (but I can't guarantee the accuracy of that), but play around with scenarios of splitting up your SIPP from your ISA and share accounts.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxA6Przq6KI1eFdCMUNsT0JVMFE/edit?pli=1

Obviously fund manager costs will be on top of the platform costs but roughly speaking fund manger costs will be the same on different platforms, so comparing platform costs is the starting point.

grey_gym_sock

yes, on that size of SIPP, and mainly in funds, the cheaper options include ATS, interactive investor, and iweb. this is where you can make the biggest saving, and it's cheaper to move before 2 june.

the ISA is small enough that fixed charges are less attractive for it. a 0.25% charge, from cavendish or charles stanley, would be reasonable on that size ISA. or iweb again - they look cheap for almost everybody.

these pretty pictures on the lang cat blog give a rough idea of who's cheap for different size pots and ISA vs SIPP: http://langcatfinancial.co.uk/2014/01/platforms-faahzands-em-barclays-et-al-go-top/

for the shares account, you could always pay to take the shares out in certificated form while you decide where to put them. which would enable you to close that account before 2 june, and avoid a closure fee on it.

darren72

SnowMan wrote: »

If you are moving to interactive investor then you might want to move your share account and ISA account there also. You might want to check with them whether their £80pa ISA/dealing account charge applies if you have a SIPP account as well, nobody is quite sure. But if it isn't waived you get 2 free trades a quarter in any case.

Thanks for all the comments.

I've spoken to III today to query this. They confirmed that if you are paying the £120+VAT annual charge for the SIPP, then there are no further fees to pay for the ISA.

They did mention that there is a £50+VAT transfer-in fee for the SIPP however, and a £100+VAT transfer-out fee should the situation to do this arise.

darren72

I'm seriously considering either iweb or iii, but I'm struggling to find the majority of my funds on the iweb website - Am I doing something wrong, as I wouldn't have thought they wouldn't offer all of these ??

GB0033873919 - First State Global Emerging Mkt Leaders Class A Acc
GB0030281066 - HL Multi-Manager Special Situations Trust Acc
GB00B2NHJ040 - Jupiter India Acc
GB0031425233 - Kames High Yield Bond Class A Retail Acc
GB0031952269 - M&G Global Basics Class X Income
GB00B04H0T52 - Neptune Russia & Greater Russia Class A Retail Acc
GB00B0MY6Z69 - Newton Asian Income Inc
GB00B13HMT78 - Old Mutual Global Best Ideas Acc
GB00B3P2K895 - Royal London Corporate Bond Trust Class A Inc
IE0032571592 - Royal London Sterling Extra Yield Bond Class B Inc
GB00B1L2QB47 - Schroder Managed Balanced Class H Acc

GB00B5640222 - Artemis Global Energy Retail Acc
GB00B3VDDQ59 - Artemis Strategic Assets Retail Acc
GB00B5129B32 - Jupiter Absolute Return Acc
GB00B24F1P65 - Lazard Emerging Markets Retail Acc

Any ideas ??

xylophone

http://www.iii.co.uk/funds/fundfilter?task=show_fund_search&o=1&searchtype=basic&submitted=&l=50&FS__FSM__id=27&FS__FSS__id=&FS__fn=
You have tried here?

darren72

Thanks for your reply.

I'm finding the majority of them on iii, just not on i-web.

Thanks

pip895

I found CSD were pretty good on having a wide range of available funds. You may find the issue is that at least some of your funds have closed to new investment or soft closed. I spoke to CSD about it and they said you could transfer them all in but you wouldn't be able to buy more and if you were getting loyalty bonus on any of them, you would be likely to loose it, at last until clean classes were offered.

darren72

I looked at CSD (Assuming that is Charles Stanley), and they are about double the price of iii and iweb for me.

I hadn't thought about the fact that some of the funds may have been closed to new investment and therefore not showing.

itm2

I'm in a similar position to the OP (looking at moving SIPP/ISA/Funds portfolio away from HL). I invest in similar holdings (managed funds rather than ITs, ETFs, etc).

My situation is slightly different however, in that I'll be going into drawdown on my SIPP next year, and HL actually seem to have quite competitive costs in that respect. I've more-or-less decided to move the ISA and Fund & Share accounts to Interactive Investors, but Interactive Investors' SIPP charges for income drawdown and GAD calculations almost cancel out the benefits of their lower custody charges.

For example, I reckon I'd save around £400pa on custody charges on my £125k SIPP by moving it to Interactive Investors, but would incur at least £200pa in extra fees relating to drawdown. Couple that with the fact that I would also want to keep my HL SIPP account open because of 3 funds which aren't available on the II platform, and it seems that moving my SIPP wouldn't really make sense.

My fund choices tend to be quite esoteric (i.e. many are not available from Charles Stanley, Alliance Trust, etc), and II offered the best selection at the lowest cost, but their SIPP charges for drawdown are just making it unfeasible.

Has anyone else been faced with a similar dilemma? Are there any other SIPP providers I should look at who can combine low income drawdown costs with a wide range of managed funds?

Mattygroves2

The versions you'll find on iWeb will be clean so will be a different class. I tried a few of them and found them listed but in a slightly different form. However the website was implying they couldn't be bought in an ISA but this maybe out of date as they've scrapped the separate funds / shares ISAs but not updated for that yet.

There is a conversion table somewhere on one of the sites which shows which funds haven't got a clean version yet. Sorry I can't remember where but no doubt someone will know.