Last Minute Help - Move HTB to Lifetime ISA?

Queevs

Hi All,

Somehow I missed this (life has been a bit hectic in the last few months) and I only realised today that in order to get my bonus (as I don't plan on buying a home), I need to move my Help to Buy to a Lifetime ISA by tomorrow. Am I reading things correctly? Or have I seen something and totally panicked unnecessarily? I opened the HTB with the view to moving it to a Lifetime ISA without realising that there would be a time limit on doing so

Thanks,
Queevs

tnIRV

You can move to a LISA at any time and fill it with your £4000 annual allowance.

However to get the extra money that you could have got with transferring within this 17/18 tax year; i am afraid you have missed the deadline, i moved to skipton to enable me to get it and they're deadline was the end of march for transferring from HTB ISA to their LISA. You will still get a bonus on 2018/19 £4000 allowance though.

Queevs

*Edited
Sorry, misread your post the first time. So I won't get the 25% when I transfer the HTB amount to a Lifetime ISA. Darn. Ah well, that'll teach me to read a bit more about things

eskbanker

Queevs wrote: »

Somehow I missed this (life has been a bit hectic in the last few months) and I only realised today that in order to get my bonus (as I don't plan on buying a home), I need to move my Help to Buy to a Lifetime ISA by tomorrow. Am I reading things correctly? Or have I seen something and totally panicked unnecessarily? I opened the HTB with the view to moving it to a Lifetime ISA without realising that there would be a time limit on doing so

What are you actually trying to achieve with HTB and/or LISA if you're not planning on buying a home? If you're planning to save for retirement then LISA is likely to be the better choice (of the two), but if not then you'd probably be best sticking with HTB, even though you wouldn't be able to claim the bonus....

Queevs

I'm saving for retirement as I started doing a pension later than I'd have liked. I do pay a good bit into the pension but I'm concerned that it won't be enough.

Ultimately I should probably be visiting a financial advisor but anxiety is kicking my behind at the minute so I feel a little like I'm running around like a headless chicken. What I've done is open a Cash LISA with Skipton to take advantage of the £4000 that I can save in this tax year and will look at whether merging the two or keeping them separate is best in the next tax year. This may be me putting things on the long finger again but at least I've got the £4k allowance for 17/18 taken up for the LISA and I already have the same done for the HTB.

eskbanker

If you've opened a LISA then you must be under 40, so if you have retirement planning in mind then it really won't be sensible to be keeping that money in cash deposit form as it's very unlikely even to keep pace with inflation over that long term!

Read up on investment instead and use the S&S variant of LISA rather than the cash one....

Or consider whether buying a property makes better sense than renting?