Child savings account. Confused!!!

Keep_pedalling

louloubelle79 wrote: »

Hello
I recently opened for my DD 9 DS 7 a JISA with One Family, and child pensions with Legal and General with £20 going in per month each account. Hoping this will give them a better start than I did.

There are prob better rates out there now for JISAs though. Quidco also offer cash back on some JISAs.

Look at overall costs rather than things like cash back. vanguard charge 0.15% platform fee plus 0.22% for their LS funds, The One Family JISA has a 1.5% management fee which is very expensive.

Alexland

Agreed you need to be very selective when taking out products through cashback sites. Sometimes the offers are really good but I agree the One Family is a stinker as the high compound fees will errode the return.

Westie983

You have some good advice here.

I would suggest a JISA as this is better for long term rather then using regular savers which you have correctly noticed is only for short term build up, that said nothing wrong with using regular saver for a year, moving the money to a higher interest account and start again with the regular saver.

Eventually you will build up the funds in the savings account or whatever account you have chosen to received the funds from the regular saver.

Good luck I hope you find something suitable.

Westie983

Flobberchops

I have the same Halifax Reg saver and I'm pretty sure it automatically empties itself after a year into a standard children's savings pot - but the regular saver itself remains open meaning you don't have to open a fresh one or set up a new standing order. I discovered this the hard way after booking myself in to see a Halifax advisor on the mistaken assumption that the product would have to be manually renewed each year, and subsequently receiving some of the shabbiest customer service I've had in my life, but that's another story.

The setup I have for my daughter's cash savings is - for simplicity - all held with Halifax. I pay a standing order into the Kids Regular Saver (4.5% interest). After a year this gets auto-dumped into a Young Saver (2%). I then make the annual pilgrimage into a branch and ask the balance be transferred to her cash JISA (3%) where it will sit until she's 18. She has a Stocks and Shares JISA elsewhere that gets the lions share of funding but that's how I deal with the cash part of her portfolio, and it's the best compromise I've found so far between ease of access, passivity, and returns. Your mileage may vary! (Apologies if I have any of the account names or interest rates not quite right; I'm going on memory here).

Best of luck, there's some good advice on the forums but my key suggestions would be 1) Don't worry too much about cash, a Junior Stocks and Shares ISA is what your kid will thank you for when they're 18 and 2) Keep the cash simple, changing providers twice a year to extract every last tenth of a percent out of competing interest rates is a part time job that you're not getting paid for!