What are your S&S ISA charges?

bowlhead99

jdw2000 wrote: »

But then again, what's to stop any of them changing their fees at any point?

Not a lot really. You would hope the ones that changed most recently would be least likely to change soon, but it doesn't alway work out like that.

And as you mention, TD/iii are likely to be making changes anyway due to their merger so who knows what each of them will do. Is there a time-frame known for this?

No, but they don't have a transfer out charge, so are 'safe' from that perspective. TD was the bigger of the two businesses so it may be their fee scale will prevail. But the services and costs depend what type of customer base they want to go for and what they think those customers will value; its an unknown.

Having looked at the figures of a few others, TD might be a bit pricey, but it's not like I'm getting shafted either as things stand. And their website and app are quite good.

Not totally shafted, but literally double the cost of the example of Youinvest which I quoted and who also have a reasonable website and an app for if being able to check the account on the move is important.

At over £530 on under £100k, you are spending over 0.53% of your assets on fees. At £250 you are only spending 0.25%. So you're volunteering to pay almost 0.3% extra.

Lets say your return next year is 6% or £6000 on roughly £100k. to keep it simple. Giving away 0.3% to extra admin fees is giving away 5% of that 6 grand.

A few hundred quid is not massive in the grand scheme of things if you like the provider and your options are kept open by lack of exit fees. But if I said there were two Vanguard funds which would deliver the exact same performance except for charges: one of them would give 6% in a good year and -6% in a bad year, and the other would give only 0.57% in a good year and -6.3% in a bad year, you know which one you would choose.

jdw2000

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Not a lot really. You would hope the ones that changed most recently would be least likely to change soon, but it doesn't alway work out like that.No, but they don't have a transfer out charge, so are 'safe' from that perspective. TD was the bigger of the two businesses so it may be their fee scale will prevail. But the services and costs depend what type of customer base they want to go for and what they think those customers will value; its an unknown.

Not totally shafted, but literally double the cost of the example of Youinvest which I quoted and who also have a reasonable website and an app for if being able to check the account on the move is important.

At over £530 on under £100k, you are spending over 0.53% of your assets on fees. At £250 you are only spending 0.25%. So you're volunteering to pay almost 0.3% extra.

Lets say your return next year is 6% or £6000 on roughly £100k. to keep it simple. Giving away 0.3% to extra admin fees is giving away 5% of that 6 grand.

A few hundred quid is not massive in the grand scheme of things if you like the provider and your options are kept open by lack of exit fees. But if I said there were two Vanguard funds which would deliver the exact same performance except for charges: one of them would give 6% in a good year and -6% in a bad year, and the other would give only 0.57% in a good year and -6.3% in a bad year, you know which one you would choose.

Totally agree, and it's definitely on my radar to do in the coming weeks/months. I am in the process of moving my sipp and ISA to TD at the moment, so I am in no rush until all that is arranged. This will give me time to plot the next move.

Can I ask though how you got the figure of £250? Is that just for the SIPP with AJ Bell, or for the whole £95K?

jdw2000

bowlhead99 wrote: »

... shares and ITs and ETFs which don't attract the same fund platform fees....

You don't think VWRL would attract the 0.3% platform charge? Would have thought it would do as it's still a fund.


If, indeed, it doesn't, then I would be very tempted to use VWRL in my SIPP. My risk tolerance is high for my pension as I am only 40 and my pension is underweight.

jdw2000

jdw2000 wrote: »

Totally agree, and it's definitely on my radar to do in the coming weeks/months. I am in the process of moving my sipp and ISA to TD at the moment, so I am in no rush until all that is arranged. This will give me time to plot the next move.

Can I ask though how you got the figure of £250? Is that just for the SIPP with AJ Bell, or for the whole £95K?

Ah, I've re-read and see how you got the £250 for AJB - they don't have the set SIPP fee (which makes them instantly £250 cheaper than TD.

Yes, AJB/YouInvest is a good option (eve though it's a percentage fee broker). iWeb is the other stand-out.

Will do some reading around those and a few others.

bowlhead99

jdw2000 wrote: »

... shares and ITs and ETFs which don't attract the same fund platform fees....

You don't think VWRL would attract the 0.3% platform charge? Would have thought it would do as it's still a fund.

An exchange traded fund such as VWRL is still a type of collective investment scheme, i.e. a type of fund in the broad sense of the word. A vehicle for multiple investors to come together and hold multiple investments , spreading risk.

But like an "investment trust" it is NOT the type of fund which needs to be distributed via an intermediary through a fund platform.

As described in post #18, a fund platform is what you use in the situation where an intermediary arranges for you to subscribe into, hold, and redeem out of an open ended fund such as an OEIC/ICVC or Unit Trust. In other words what I described here:

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Effectively holding an OEIC or unit trust (a "fund") means you are not buying or selling on a stockmarket in real time, you just need to be able to access a fund platform to maintain an account to hold your interest in the fund on an ongoing basis and to process subscription or redemption requests and distributions and reporting etc.

So, a number of providers just offer that by charging a percentage fee which on the amounts you're talking about would be 0.25-0.45% from most of them, and call it a platform fee or custody fee.

To be able to access and hold one of those funds, like e.g. Vanguard Lifestrategy, you need to pay for fund platform services. You would log on to your account with TD or Youinvest or whomever, look up the fund, declare you'd read the offering documentation, and put an order in for them to issue you some new shares or units at the next available subscription/redemption point.

However, an exchange traded fund is not like that. The clue is in the name, it is traded in real time on a stock exchange. Bought and sold in the same way as you would buy or sell a share in a individual company like Tesco or Microsoft at any time during dealing hours You say you want it, broker places your order on the market, the order is matched, done: you're the new owner of a share at whatever the offer price was during that split second. Decide to sell, same thing, someone offers you a bit over the bid price and your broker snaps it up for you.

Buying or selling a share or investment trust or ETF is a one off transaction which does not require ongoing involvement of an intermediary like a fund platform. It's just buy or sell,a transaction based service. Any stockbroker could buy on your behalf and as long as you have an account with them they would charge you a transaction based fee for doing so. They may or may not also charge you some minimum "inactivity fee" if they are not earning ongoing transaction fees because you are not really doing anything with the account each quarter

So someone like TD will typically have one type of fee structure for buying shares and ETFs, and a different structure for buying "funds" by which they just mean open ended investment companies (oeics) or Unit Trusts. You will very often see them priced differently, or if there's a percentage based periodic fee, it would usually cap out at a lower value on your shares and ETFs than it does on your fund platform stuff.

jdw2000

Well, yet again a person at TD didn't know that. I asked whether VWRL would attract the 0.3% fund charge and I was told "yes, because it's a fund. It has 'fund' in the title".

I don't blame the staff over there, because there is a helluva lot to know. I just appreciate when people say they don't know rather than make stuff up.

jdw2000

BLB53 wrote: »

I have £30K in S&S ISA with Halifax Share Deal who charge me £12.50 p.a. which is a platform fee of 0.04%. I am invested in Vanguard LS 60 fund which has charges of 0.24% so total costs of investing are 0.28%

Halifax has kind of gone under the radar in this thread, but it does look very cheap all round. I deduce the following from what I've read:

- ISA: £12.50pa
- Investments account: free
- Sipp: £180pa (£60 pay-in fee)
- Total annual charge: £192.50
- Exit fees: £25 per holding, £90 sipp

That looks like the cheapest one of the lot. Have I missed something with Halifax?



Even iWeb can't match that overall:

- £200 one-off charge to open ISA and trading account.
- SIPP: £180pa. £60 pay-in charge.
- £180 (+ £200 + £60 as one-off charge) = £440 in first year
- £180 year 2 onwards.
- Exit fee £25 per holding + £90 for sipp

bowlhead99

jdw2000 wrote: »

Well, yet again a person at TD didn't know that. I asked whether VWRL would attract the 0.3% fund charge and I was told "yes, because it's a fund. It has 'fund' in the title".

I don't blame the staff over there, because there is a helluva lot to know. I just appreciate when people say they don't know rather than make stuff up.

You probably gave the person the wrong information.

If you said "I would like to buy an investment product called the Vanguard Lifestrategy 80 Fund, accumulation class, does it attract a fund platform charge?", they would say "yes, it's a fund to be held on a fund platform, like most of them which have 'fund' in the title".

And they would be correct, because the Lifestrategy 80 Fund is a Fund that is accessed via a fund platform.

If you said "I would like to buy an investment product called the Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF, its ticker on the London stock exchange is VWRL, does it attract a fund platform charge?", they would say "no, it is an ETF or 'exchange traded fund', you can tell that by the fact that it has ETF in the name and is listed on the London stock exchange, so the costs are just the same as any other London stock exchange listed share or ETF that is exchange traded".

And they would be correct because the Vanguard FTSE All-World ETF is an ETF which as its name implies is traded on a stock exchange not held on a fund platform.

Sorry, but there are thousands of investment products available. You can't feed them inadequate or plain wrong information about a product or product name and say that their naivety has caused them to give you a poor response. It is you being confused about what it is you would like to buy, that caused them to give you the wrong response.

jdw2000 wrote: »

Halifax has kind of gone under the radar in this thread, but it does look very cheap all round. I deduce the following from what I've read:

That looks like the cheapest one of the lot. Have I missed something with Halifax?

Even iWeb can't match that overall:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, iWeb is a budget brand owned by Halifax but branded differently to Halifax Sharedealing. They have access to the same underlying investments and on the pension side (the more expensive product to operate) they charge the same account fee for setting up, transferring in, or administering a pension.

Only the individual transaction costs (buys and sells) really differ on the pension:

- Halifax Sharedealing charge £12.50 every time you want to buy or sell any funds or shares. If you instead do your buying via their monthly purchase program on a set date per month, available for certain qualifying investments (instead of just doing it on an ad hoc basis when you feel like it), the purchases cost £2 a month per investment, though you still pay the usual £12.50 for any sales or for any ad hoc purchases.
- IWeb charge £5 for all buys and all sells.

Then for the other two accounts:

On an ongoing basis Halifax Sharedealing charge £12.50 a year to run the ISA plus £12.50 every time you want to buy or sell any funds or shares (except for buys done under the monthly purchase plan as outlined above)

On an ongoing basis IWeb charge £0 a year to run the ISA plus £5 every time you want to buy or sell.

On an ongoing basis Halifax Sharedealing charge £0 a year to run the unwrapped dealing account plus £12.50 every time you want to buy or sell (except for buys done under the monthly purchase plan as outlined above)

On an ongoing basis IWeb charge £0 a year to run the unwrapped dealing account plus £5 every time you want to buy or sell.

As you can see from that, IWeb is cheap as chips for people who are just going to buy or hold and do one or two purchases per year when they have new money to deploy, and do not have multiple holdings that they need to sell and buy to rebalance.

However, the fact that \IWeb are so outrageously cheap means that the business model was a little unsustainable as they would just get people wanting to park assets for free. To discourage that, they introduced a one-off account setup charge of £200 if you want to get on to their "£0 annual +£5 per trade" gravy train.

Halifax Sharedealing make more money per trade and at least have the £12.50/yr account maintenance fee on the ISA, so have not bothered to introduce any one-off £200 charges. Still, assuming an average of four trades a year for a typical investor, over five years the Halifax ISA customer will have spent over £200 more on fees than the IWeb investor (£12.50 a year and an extra £7.50 for each transaction) and they would have been better paying the account setup fee and using IWeb.

When shopping around for a provider it is swings and roundabouts depending on your personal profile, asset mix and trading patterns. That's why the advice is to properly understand the fee structure and know what assets you are likely to want, when, and in what amounts, in order to properly estimate what it will all cost.

And experience from the rest of the industry tells us that that if it really does just cost you hardly anything, the provider will eventually realise that they can't make much money from customers like you and change the fee structure so that they can.

jdw2000

Couple of questions:

- Halifax charge 2% of reinvested dividends (up to the value of £12.50). Is this a big deal? The person I called yesterday at Halifax made a point of telling me this too.

- iWeb and Halifax have exit fees, unlike TDDI. If they do change/hike their prices, surely you can leave them for free?


But overall, yes. Either Halifax or their iWeb arm look fine for my purposes. I guess iWeb may work out slightly cheaper over a 4-5 years period, but I am also guessing that Halifax's website and app are better to use for the purposes of checking how your various accounts are doing (even though I will not be trading I still like to see what's going on and would like to see them all on the same page if possible).

bowlhead99

jdw2000 wrote: »

Couple of questions:

- Halifax charge 2% of reinvested dividends (up to the value of £12.50). Is this a big deal? The person I called yesterday at Halifax made a point of telling me this too.

If you have a £50,000 investment that pays a £300 dividend twice a year you will probably want to spend or reinvest the money.

Manually redeploying the money to buy more investments will cost you a transaction fee of £5 or £12.50 or whatever your provider charges. Whereas not redeploying the money for half a year until you get more dividends and get round to doing it, might lose you a few percent of investment gains.

So, being able to re-invest the dividends for 2% of the £300 (i.e. £6 instead of £12.50) is handy. It is still more than the £5 at Iweb.

However, if you are just buying OEICs such as Vanguard Lifestrategy then you would pick the 'accumulation' version of the fund within your ISA and SIPP and never receive a cash dividend anyway.

- iWeb and Halifax have exit fees, unlike TDDI. If they do change/hike their prices, surely you can leave them for free?

If their terms and conditions say that they can vary the prices for a range of reasons, and they do that, tough. You have already accepted that you will pay an exit fee if you want them to perform the work of transferring your assets elsewhere, which is not a zero-effort task on their behalf.

Some providers would take pity on investors facing a price hike, and waive the fees. However providers that are less keen to lose droves of customers to free transfers out would discourage them from leaving by not waiving the fees, and would be happy to face a bit of adverse publicity.

In that situation, if you wanted to complain you could complain and see if they let you off. When they didn't let you off you could complain further and see whether the ombudsman agreed with the provider that the charges were in line with the contract and the contract was not an unfair contract. You might or might not win and the decision might not be quick, during which time you would have to either let them take the fees and move you, or just stay with them and hope the ombudsman eventually tells them to let you off and move you for free.

Good luck with your investments. I don't use Halifax or IWeb and was only mentioning them as examples of fixed fee providers, but people here seem to use them without major problems, as long as the fund you want is in their funds list and you don't want sophisticated share dealing functionality or built in research and portfolio management tools etc.

As you are just going to buy and hold you don't need much in the way of sophistication. Progress of all the funds or shares you are going to buy can be viewed on free tools such as Trustnet.com or FT.com as a virtual portfolio, so as a long term buy and hold investor even if you can't wean yourself off the habit of checking the values every day or week, you don't need a provider with a pretty summary page or smartphone app. Smartphones can open websites anyway