Pensioner Bonds Guide

john1950

I will be 65 on 22nd January so am quite pleased that no date for the bonds has been announced yet. Even so, £10Billion is the figure quoted in the article which is an awful lot of money and I cannot see that it will all go in 2/3 weeks surely.
I bought some RPI plus 0.5% in 2011 and they had been around for some time.
Just really keen to shift some of the 1.25% ISA money I have away from Nationwide.

Starship9

Just been on the phone to NS&I about these on behalf of Mum-in-Law. She has a £10K fixed interest certificate investment with them now which is currently getting .9%. Apparently she can't convert / transfer this into one of the new bonds, she has to close the account, get the funds transferred from NS&I to her bank account then open the bond and transfer the funds back into NS&I. Seems pretty inefficient to me :undecided

Anyway we might as well get on with filling out the form and putting it in the post.....

Primrose

Starship9 wrote: »

Just been on the phone to NS&I about these on behalf of Mum-in-Law. She has a £10K fixed interest certificate investment with them now which is currently getting .9%. Apparently she can't convert / transfer this into one of the new bonds, she has to close the account, get the funds transferred from NS&I to her bank account then open the bond and transfer the funds back into NS&I. Seems pretty inefficient to me :undecided

Anyway we might as well get on with filling out the form and putting it in the post.....

Lack of joined up thinking like this really annoys me. You would think switching money within the same organisation would be simple, wouldn',t you? Nobody seems to want to go the extra mile. I'd like to send in the John Lewis Customer Service folks to sort them out!

colsten

Starship9 wrote: »

Just been on the phone to NS&I about these on behalf of Mum-in-Law. She has a £10K fixed interest certificate investment with them now which is currently getting .9%. Apparently she can't convert / transfer this into one of the new bonds, she has to close the account, get the funds transferred from NS&I to her bank account then open the bond and transfer the funds back into NS&I. Seems pretty inefficient to me :undecided

Anyway we might as well get on with filling out the form and putting it in the post.....

Why does your MIL have £10K lingering in a 0.9% interest account if she can get 3, 4, 5 and 6% on that money in instant access accounts? Has she maxed current and regular savings accounts?

Starship9

colsten wrote: »

Why does your MIL have £10K lingering in a 0.9% interest account if she can get 3, 4, 5 and 6% on that money in instant access accounts? Has she maxed current and regular savings accounts?

Because she does not actively manage her investments. She is concentrating on staying alive at the moment being rather ill and in her late 80's. We help where and when we can

colsten

Starship9 wrote: »

Because she does not actively manage her investments. She is concentrating on staying alive at the moment being rather ill and in her late 80's. We help where and when we can

Should you, or someone else, have a POA for her if she needs help with her savings, and if she is in her late 80s? Focussing on problems with moving her money within NS&I seems to be ignoring the real issues.

Starship9

colsten wrote: »

Should you, or someone else, have a POA for her if she needs help with her savings, and if she is in her late 80s? Focussing on problems with moving her money within NS&I seems to be ignoring the real issues.

Thanks for that advice. We will bear it in mind.

Do you have any views on the narrower issue that I posted on, ie: the efficiency or otherwise of transferring funds within NS&I ?.

Is there a trick that we and the advisor I spoke to at NS&I have missed do you think ?

linda.sno

As these are for older people what happens if they die before the fixed term is up? Do they get the full interest amount up to the date of death?

colsten

The T&Cs will specify what happens upon death.

Usually, accounts get closed without penalty upon the death of sole account holders and the balance plus accrued interest will become part of the diseased's estate. Funds, after any applicable IHT, from the estate will become available to the heirs for them to do as they please.

If it's a joint account, usually the funds will pass straight away to the other account holder.

In neither case, any interest will be lost (and the diseased would be the last one to worry about interest).

mgdavid

colsten wrote: »

The T&Cs will specify what happens upon death.

and we don't have them yet; worth noting that it's now halfway though January and still no news on the NS&I site about a start date.

colsten wrote: »

....... will become part of the diseased's estate.....

unfortunate freudian slip there C.
Deceased.