Withdrawing funds from a single premium investment bond

dunstonh

Your point is?

Top slicing relief is a relief that can be used to reduce tax liability and can be one of the key reasons for doing an investment bond. Calculating the relief is no more difficult than working out capital gains tax liability on unit trusts.

Any tax relief is going to have HMRC documentation.

No it isn't.There has been a decline in the number of complaints about IBs (no doubt reflecting the stockmarket recovery), but they are still in second place after endowments:

2004 7222 complaints
2005 6281
2006 4541

So, the decline in investment bonds is in your opinion due to the stockmarket recovery. That means had those individuals been in unit trusts in identical funds then the figures would be against unit trusts and you would now be telling everyone how bad they are?

The stockmarket recovery will account for some of those as it is normal for complaints to increase after a crash. However, the main reason they were higher in those years was that with profits bonds and SCARPS complaints increased and are now finding their way out of the system. As I said higher up, they are nothing like unit linked bonds. It would be nice for the FOS to show the differences but they dont. Realistically, you are going to get the same level of complaints about a unit linked investment as you are unit trusts as they both have identical funds and can be both set up in the same ways. The only difference is the taxation and you dont often get people complaining about tax wrappers.