Proceeds of house sale

activmariner

Hi,

I'm a bit unsure of what is the best course of action with the proceeds of my house sale.

My wife and I have sold our property and will be in receipt of approx £380k. This money is earmaked for the purchase of another property in the near future - 4/5 weeks.

I bank with Halifax, my wife with Barclays. We have a joint account with Halifax. As I understand it, a joint account allows double the level of cover under the FSCS.

I was hoping for some advice from anybody who has faced a similar situation. Do we go down the road of stashing the money in several accounts, utilising the £85k limit under FCS or is there another way?

Thanks in advance

da_rule

Joint accounts do double the limit (£170,000). So with that and your wife's single account you will have £255,000 covered.

You can either open another account at another bank, but this is hassle for the sake of 4-5 weeks. It depends how worried you are that your banks are going to run into financial problems in those few weeks.

marlot

You could park £60k in premium bonds without too much hassle.

agrinnall

I have opened a NS&I Direct Saver account for just this purpose (although longer term than your plans). It pays 1.1% and fully protects up to £2 million.

CWSmith

We've just been in that situation. For the sake of a few weeks, (at the end of December) we just opened a new Barclays savings account (we already had a current account with them) and bunged the house sale cheque in that. The whole procedure took no more than 5 minutes.

We are just about to pay for the next house out of that new account - untouched by human hand since December - and so obviously no money laundering.

We figured Barclays was probably unlikely to die in the interim.