Lisa and Help to buy

diz79

Hi



I was wondering if anyone can help, Ive already got a LISA but was looking at maybe doing help to buy as well ive loked through this, I couldnt see if it was possible to transfer some funds from the lisa to the help to buy. Im close to buying a property but when for the lisa as you couls save more.



https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2016/07/24984/


I may just set up anyway as can put 1200 in straight away.


Thanks in asdvacne

bowlhead99

When you come to buy the property you will have a choice to *either* use the money from your LISA (with the bonus you got, without a penalty), or to claim the bonus on a HTB ISA and use that. But you can't get both bonuses towards the property.

Given the choice, you are right that the LISA allows larger contributions so it usually makes sense to use that instead of a HTB ISA. And if you withdraw from the LISA to get some money to put into the HTB, you'd face a withdrawal penalty, because "I'd like to use the money to open a different type of saving account" isn't a valid reason to make a penalty-free withdrawal

You are right that you could just set a HTB up anyway using other money, but if you're not actually going to be able to use it to claim a bonus (because you can only use one or the other, and logically you would use the LISA instead to get more free money towards the property purchase) the only reason to set one up is that the interest rates are usually a bit better than normal savings.

The interest rates on HTB ISAs are quite competitive because the amount you can put into then is limited and not everyone qualifies to get them (because they've already owned property) so it doesn't cost the banks much to offer decent interest rates on them.