Cost £1,000 to leave Hargreaves Lansdown

Glen_Clark

Have Hargreaves Lansdown have stopped buying Adverts in the Telegraph?...........

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/11217500/It-cost-me-1000-to-leave-Hargreaves-Lansdown-but-its-still-worth-it.html

kidmugsy

Surprise, surprise, it's expensive to transfer 45 different holdings.

What an odd way to invest. That's more holdings than Fundsmith uses.

Glen_Clark

kidmugsy wrote: »

Surprise, surprise, it's expensive to transfer 45 different holdings.

Sure, but thats about a fortnight's wages for a clerk - how long does it take him?
I agree 45 holdings is too much now, indeed one well diversified fund may be enough, but if he started out when fund prices were a total rip off - 5% initial charge, trail commission, etc etc, he probably decided to create his own fund with individual shares.

kidmugsy

Glen_Clark wrote: »

Sure, but thats about a fortnight's wages for a clerk

Your point would carry more weight if the only cost in a business was employing clerks.

masonic

kidmugsy wrote: »

Your point would carry more weight if the only cost in a business was employing clerks.

HL levy the charge specifically for the transfer of a line of stock in specie. It is not supposed to subsidise its other operating costs (it has a 0.45% platform fee that covers those).

kidmugsy

masonic wrote: »

HL levy the charge specifically for the transfer of a line of stock in specie. It is not supposed to subsidise its other operating costs (it has a 0.45% platform fee that covers those).

The cost of employing a clerk does not equal the wages of the clerk.

JohnRo

Just like shifting a few lines of stock doesn't "cost" £1000

It's nothing more than price gouging.

jimjames

Surely anyone who has been quoted £1000 to transfer would look at other ways of doing it? I can't believe someone would just pay without reviewing cheaper options.

Either move as cash or single stock would have massively reduced price and been far quicker. I needed to move some money out of my HL ISA recently. As I've not used this years allowance I just sold the holding and rebought in the new ISA. I did it same day so wasn't out of the market and just had to wait for the proceeds to come to top my savings back up again.

JohnRo

It seems obvious Jim, but clearly not to some. His ignorance or whatever it was that caused the move in specie still doesn't excuse the gouging racket imho.

colsten

Shame Mr Mace didn't do more googling for HL exit charges as he would have found at least the MSE thread that helped people to get the exit charges waived. May be his 45 individual holdings kept him occupied?

Joking aside, the exit charges of some firms do seem at the high end. May be it is co-incidence but it's basically the same firms who have high management charges who also have the high exit charges.

masonic

kidmugsy wrote: »

The cost of employing a clerk does not equal the wages of the clerk.

Yes, I know that. I wasn't responding to Glenn's post, I was responding to yours. You wrote "employing clerks" rather than "wages of clerks".

In any case, given what I've heard about the wages at HL, I wouldn't be surprised if the wage for a typical clerk was more than the total cost to HL of employing one of its own clerks.