Charles Stanley fee payments

Vendee

My wife and I both have stocks & shares ISA's with Charles Stanley direct. I had previously been with H&L but transferred to CS because of the lower fees. When I transferred, there was a cash balance of about £50 pounds which has been used to pay the monthly fees but it has almost run out now.

Coincidentally, today I got an email from CS stating that they were changing the way that you could pay your fees. I quote from the email:-

"We are writing to let you know of a change affecting how you can pay your ISA fees. From 18 November 2017 you will only be able to make “subscription” payments to your ISA. Currently, you also have the option of making “fee” payments to cover any recent charges against your ISA without affecting your annual ISA allowance. However, because of the high administrative overheads involved, we will no longer be offering this option. For the same reason, we will also be increasing the minimum subscription payment to £20.

We would like to minimise any inconvenience to you and further appreciate that you may wish to ensure that you are still able to get the most from your yearly ISA allowance. We would therefore like to extend an invitation to you to have all fees for your ISA taken from your Investment account."

I'm confused about these "subscription" payments and how they differ from "fee" payments. Could someone please enlighten me?

The "investment account" option is a non starter as it appears that you need to open this account with a min of £500 and I am not going to do that just to pay £4.50 per month in fees.

Thanks in advance.

ColdIron

I pay my CSD ISA fees from their general investment account and it works out well for me though I do have money invested there. I think the £500 is the minimum you can invest in a fund and not a minimum requirement to open the account. I can't think why you couldn't set up a £50 direct debit or just pay in every now and then with your debit card without purchasing a fund. Why don't you send them a secure message and ask them? They are pretty quick to answer

TrustyOven

ColdIron wrote: »

I pay my CSD ISA fees from their general investment account and it works out well for me though I do have money invested there. I think the £500 is the minimum you can invest in a fund and not a minimum requirement to open the account. I can't think why you couldn't set up a £50 direct debit or just pay in every now and then with your debit card without purchasing a fund. Why don't you send them a secure message and ask them? They are pretty quick to answer

The minimum investment amounts get confusing.

My experience with CSD, was that some funds have a £100 or £500 minimum, but that seems to drop to £100 once you actually hold the fund, and £50 for when doing monthly investments (I think it was regardless of whether you already held that fund or not).

I also got this email today and I've not had the time to spend thinking about it. My impression is that I just need to fund £20 more each time I am running low on the capital account, since that seems to be the location where they take the money for the charges. I'm not sure if that's also changing.

My understanding is that this means is that I am very very slowly using up my annual ISA allowance in order to pay the platform fees.

ColdIron, if I understand you correctly, I should be able to open a normal dealing account with them, fund it with some cash (and keep that cash uninvested), and select some option to allow them to take the charges out of that account? Is that correct?
If so, then that is the same arrangement I have with H-L (with my SIPP), so I could be comfortable doing the same with CSD for the ISA.

ColdIron

TrustyOven wrote: »

The minimum investment amounts get confusing.

My experience with CSD, was that some funds have a £100 or £500 minimum, but that seems to drop to £100 once you actually hold the fund, and £50 for when doing monthly investments (I think it was regardless of whether you already held that fund or not).

That's my experience but I've only been Bed and ISAing for a while now and not making small purchases

I also got this email today and I've not had the time to spend thinking about it. My impression is that I just need to fund £20 more each time I am running low on the capital account, since that seems to be the location where they take the money for the charges. I'm not sure if that's also changing.

Not sure about this, I formed the impression from the email above that it was previously possible to pay for the fees without it affecting your subscription allowance. I haven't received an email, presumably as it doesn't affect me

My understanding is that this means is that I am very very slowly using up my annual ISA allowance in order to pay the platform fees.

If you just allow them to collect the fees from your ISA cash account yes. That's why I elected to have the fees collected outside the ISA, it's not much but every little helps

ColdIron, if I understand you correctly, I should be able to open a normal dealing account with them, fund it with some cash (and keep that cash uninvested), and select some option to allow them to take the charges out of that account? Is that correct?
If so, then that is the same arrangement I have with H-L (with my SIPP), so I could be comfortable doing the same with CSD for the ISA.

Yes that's correct and what I do though I also have investments, however that shouldn't make any difference

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