Halifax Help To Buy Isa - quick question

GreyPilgrim

Sure this has been asked before but is there any thing stopping me using this as a an ordinary ISA?

We had planned to buy a house in about two years time, so we thought the HTB 25% bonus Isa was a no brainer.

However we'd only got two months (£1,200) into it when the plans changed and we went ahead and bought the house with the cash we had already saved. We hadn't reached the threshold to qualify for the bonus so we just left the cash in there.

Is there anything stopping us from just carrying on paying in the £200 a month into the ISA? Obviously we can't take advantage of the 25% bonus now, but the 4% rate doesn't seem that bad. We are already taking advantage of a couple of other High interest accounts (First direct regular savers, Lloyds, etc) for remaining savings...

YorkshireBoy

Is your account still paying 4% AER?

GreyPilgrim

Had me worried there


Yeah, just logged in and it's showing as 4%

jimjames

Is there a declaration you need to make at any point to say you are still a first time buyer? Obviously you were when you opened the account so that's not an issue but if you need to do so each year you wouldn't then qualify.


Are you also using the regular savers that pay up to 6%?

GreyPilgrim

Yeah, we've got two regular savers, and the lloyds 5% account.

Might give then a call to clarify...

Westie983

No nothing to stop you keeping the account, on closure you just send the funds to your bank account as you are given three pieces of paper, one for the bank to keep, one for you, and one for the solicitor.. no questions asked on closure.

YorkshireBoy

GreyPilgrim wrote: »

Yeah, we've got two regular savers

There are 8 available (between the both of you) paying 5-6% AER, and taking a total of £2,600 a month. Why settle for 4% on £200 a month (each)?

and the lloyds 5% account.

Which one is that?

GreyPilgrim

YorkshireBoy wrote: »

There are 8 available (between the both of you) paying 5-6% AER, and taking a total of £2,600 a month. Why settle for 4% on £200 a month (each)?Which one is that?

Not lloyds. Where did I get lloyds from? Meant TSB.

Lingua

If you are with Halifax, the 4% rate will drop to the normal rate (2% I believe) once you have had the account for 12 mnths.

Westie983

Lingua wrote: »

If you are with Halifax, the 4% rate will drop to the normal rate (2% I believe) once you have had the account for 12 mnths.

Not heard this news, but will check if anything is mentioned on the internal systems,

Customers will need to have 30 days notice of any rate change, so as the account was first offered in December, still got a few months to go, if the information is correct of course.

JJW101

One thing that's better about HTB ISA's (compared to normal regular savers) is that you can open it with £1200, and after a year you don't have to close it and start again from zero.

Didn't see in the small print that the Halifax rate drops from 4% after a year, but you could be right - it's a high a rate to allow people build up a big sum.