I have £32k to save and am looking for advice on my plan or other suggestions

isaadvice

Hi all,
I'm looking for some advice on what to do with approximately £32,000 I currently have spread across various ISAs and savings accounts.

The current situation is:

• Approx £18k in a 2yr Santander ISA, recently finished and dropped to maybe 1%?
• Approx £6k locked into a Halifax 18 month ISA at 2%
• Approx £6k in a normal Halifax savings account at 0.9%
• Approx £1k balance in my Lloyds current account. This is my day to day account with a few DD and my salary (just over £1.5k pm).
• Also have a credit card with Lloyds which I rarely use.
• Approx £100 emergency cash in the Halifax current account, but no activity besides being used to transfer money to the savings/ISA held at Halifax.
• I have the full £15k NISA allowance available for this tax year.

My plan:

• Upgrade my Lloyds account to Lloyds Club. Keep a balance of £5k to make use of the 4% interest rate.
• Open a Santander 123 account and deposit £20k to make use of the 3% interest rate. Also use this account to pay all bills.
• Open a Lloyds club regular saver with 4% rate and deposit £400 (the max allowed?) each month from the Lloyds Club account.
• Leave the £6k in the 18 month Halifax ISA and put any spare cash in each month (probably around £100-200 pm)

To meet the requirements of the 2 new accounts I'll get my £1.5k salary paid into Lloyds then I will set up some DDs:

• Lloyds: £500 to the Santander acc and £400 to my partner towards our rent.
• Santander: Mobile contract and another bill

The Santander account will end up with more than £20k most months so I will skim any surplus after that months bills are paid back into my Lloyds account.

Does anyone see any issues with my plan? Is it wise to remove nearly £20k from an ISA, despite the better rates available elsewhere? We would like to look into buying somewhere in the next few years, so easy access would probably be preferred.

The only problems I see are if I get rejected when opening the Club and 123 accounts. I was recently rejected when applying for an upgrade on my basic Halifax account, no idea why - never been in debt or used my overdraft, always paid off credit cards as soon as I made a purchase etc. (Having said that, since the rejection, I stupidly missed a CC payment when I was switched to paperless billing and I wasn't paying attention. It was just under 30 days late if that makes a difference). Although I'm hoping having £18k in savings will help with Santander and holding an an active current account always in credit at Lloyds should hopefully help too.

Any comments on the above plan, or any suggestions for a different strategy to save the £32k?

Thanks

P.s new account as my main account is my name and for obvious reasons I'd rather not post this info.

vouch0r

your plan is good/ok, ISAs are rubbish again this year stay clear of them IMO. especially at halifax.

can easily get approx 10k at 4-5% and the rest in a 1-2-3 account at 3% - your plan is pretty much spot on except for the isa

dont forget nationwide flex, and TSB accounts for massive 5% on smaller amounts

Archi_Bald

Your plan sounds ok overall. There are always variations to the theme, such as exploiting the 4 and 5% current accounts, and the 4, 4.5 and 6% regular savers. But I think you are spot on with the general idea.

The risk of saving outside a cash ISA for expenditures in the next few years sounds minimal to me, but only you can decide whether the apparent advantages of non-ISA accounts are likely to be true advantages to you.

fenwick458

you could open 2 X TSB accounts and put £4000 in them and get 5% on them, and open a nationwide aco!!!! and put £2500 in and get 5% on that too. just pay £1000 a month into the naitionwide from another account, then from there £500 into each TSB account and then transfer it back to where it came from.

Fruit_and_Nut_Case

fenwick458 wrote: »

... aco!!!! ...

I love how the MSE profanity shield deals with typos

badger09

isaadvice wrote: »

To meet the requirements of the 2 new accounts I'll get my £1.5k salary paid into Lloyds then I will set up some DDs:

• Lloyds: £500 to the Santander acc and £400 to my partner towards our rent.
• Santander: Mobile contract and another bill

In addition to what others have said - just make sure you're not confusing Direct Debits with Standing Orders. Those I've highlighted would be SOs, not DDs. However, it is easy to set op a couple of DDs if you don't have any spare - eg to Tesco savings accounts, charities etc

isaadvice

ah good point badger09, I will probably set up a few more bills with DD so that should be ok.

Thanks for the replies everyone, I'll look into the other accounts mentioned, but am leaning towards sticking with my plan so I don't end up with tons of accounts and a headache trying to keep track of them all!