Best current account with no regular income?

jimjames

mgdavid wrote: »

OK if you are in it for the long haul - 10 years or so; less than that you have to ask yourself 'do I feel lucky? Gambling is rarely as good as an assured profit!

It really isn't gambling if you are investing in funds. When you gamble you have a very high risk of losing your entire stake.
If you invest properly in a balanced portfolio then that is negligible risk.

If you invest in the top companies in the UK or worldwide then the chance of them falling to nothing is as close to zero as you can get. Yes it may drop by 40%-50% in the space of a year or so but should rise back again - even after the crash of 2008/9 the markets were back by 2010/11.

Amazing how many people say they are risk averse yet will buy a lottery ticket every week when the risk of losing your money is almost guaranteed and 14 million against winning jackpot.

letiss7

colsten wrote: »

DDs aren't hard to get as you will see from many other threads on here. Just set up a couple of Tesco savings accounts and you can have as many DDs as you like.

I've been reading this thread with interest and would like to open a Club Lloyds account. Paying in the £1500 is not a problem as I can play the switching game. I have setup SOs but I thought DDs were requested by a company to withdraw money from an individual's account ?
Other than moving 2 DDs from my main current account how do I setup DDs?

Do the Tescos accounts allow you to setup a DD? Is that the part I'm missing?

Sorry for such a basic question.

colsten

Any number of DDs are easy to set up from Tesco savings accounts, as has been mentioned a few hundred times on here.

Please try it before asking further questions about it.

letiss7

Thank you Colsten.
I did carry out a few searches before asking the question but searching for the words Tesco, savings, direct debits was returning many hundreds of threads as I'm sure you can imagine and I didn't want to setup a Tescos savings account only to find out I could setup a DD.

I appreciate the time you took to answer the question.

xylophone

Open one Tesco Internet Saver and one Tesco Instant Access Saver and set up a DD on each to pull money once a month from Lloyds - the mid month will probably be best.

letiss7

Thank you xylophone

elwy

I thought I'd post an update on this thread since I finally pulled my head out of the sand and sorted out my finances. So in case anyone is interested, this is what I decided to do.


I was fairly disgusted with the interest rates on saving accounts and cash ISAs and I don't expect things to improve any time soon. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that S&S is the best place for savings right now.


I blew the dust off my S&S ISA holdings and discovered that I've made a profit of 33% over the four years I've had them, or an average of 8.25% per year. Well that's rather nice and encouraging!


A large part of my success was due to investment choices in the U.S. and in high yield Income generating funds. So my first instinct was to pump more money into those funds and ditch the defensive funds which hadn't been performing so well. I nearly forgot for a moment that it's easy to make money when the markets are doing well and things can quickly go pear-shaped when they're not. That's why I put the defensive funds there in the first place.


A major audit and rebalancing followed while I re-learned everything I'd forgotten since I set up the S&S ISA four years ago. Each fund that I chose had been selected for a purpose, namely either geographic sector growth, Income generation or defensive strategies. Originally they'd been weighted to create a balanced portfolio but by now the weightings were way out of whack.


Another thing I found was that all my holdings were Inclusive funds from before the RDR and there are now cheaper unbundled versions particularly for the index tracker funds. I'm still in the process of selling my inclusive trackers for shiny new unbundled versions.


Other funds were actively managed which I'd taken because there weren't any cheap tracker funds available at the time. Now there is a much better choice of cheap trackers and I'll be gradually switching to them where I can.


My rebalancing strategy is going to be about 30% geographic index trackers, 40% income generation funds and 30% defensive and capital preservation funds.


The main problem I have right now is a large pool of cash from my hastily ISA'd allowance. I'm afraid to invest it all at once in case the timing is bad so I'm going to try to drip-feed it into funds over a few months.


Though it might be difficult to believe from my evident dizziness earlier in the thread, I think that S&S investment actually suits me better than chasing after the best interest rates every year. I'm the sort of the person who likes to carefully set up a portfolio to look after itself and then leave the money to mature over a long period without worrying about it too much. The problem is, once it's out of my mind I tend to forget all about it. This time, I'm making sure I write everything down so I won't have to research everything again!

moneyfoolish

YorkshireBoy wrote: »

A suggestion...


Swap your 3 x Lloyds Vantage for 3 x BoS Vantage. These have the same conditions as your Lloyds Vantage accounts had prior to last July.


Set up some cross-firing £1K standing orders from 1>2>3>1.


Cream off £30 a month interest (and forget about the £180 interest you've lost by not doing this last Summer ).

Can you move the £1K from each BoS Vantage to another or does the £1K have to come into each BoS account from an outside account?

jimjames

elwy wrote: »

I think that S&S investment actually suits me better than chasing after the best interest rates every year. I'm the sort of the person who likes to carefully set up a portfolio to look after itself and then leave the money to mature over a long period without worrying about it too much.

That's a very good point.

The majority of people who put money in a savings account and just leave it there with no thought as to interest rates could probably do far better putting the money in a S&S ISA and leaving it instead.

It is far easier with a S&S ISA to not need to worry about this annual "find the best cash ISA" battle that seems to go on.

badger09

moneyfoolish wrote: »

Can you move the £1K from each BoS Vantage to another or does the £1K have to come into each BoS account from an outside account?

Since the T&C don't specify external funding internal transfers are fine with BoS Vantage.