Hargreaves Lansdown - Active Savings

Primrose

Is anybody  on here using this facility?  I confess it had merit in my eyes just to get one single  tax /interest certificate covering all one,s separate savings pots rather than the annual scramble to collect them individually every year but is there a potential disadvantage in gathering together all one,s savings under one roof like this?  Some of our savings are in fixed rate accounts of different length durations so I'mm not sure whether these can be accommodated.    Any thoughts or disadvantages please ?

Bravepants

I'm not "dodgy", but my partner and I have used it this past year.

HL make money from a small percentage fee charged to each provider bank. I don't think this affects the interest rate given to us as the end customer. Main advantage is that it's convenient and saves a lot of manual searching. But saying that we have not renewed our fixed rates because rates are now very close to what we can get in something like NS&I without locking our money away for a year or five! NS&I have no limits to protection, so we could bung EVERYTHING in there.

AnotherJoe

I also am not dodgy (some might disagree) and use it.

I got it for the ease of use of swapping rather than tax certificate though i guess thats also an ease of use , just hadn't occurred to me..

Have considered NS&I but so many horror stories about opening accounts etc.

quirkydeptless

Not in my experience

I have savings there selected from top rates when they were available and over 2%

Very sad rates now though wherever you look.

ColdIron

I've had several of these. Very convenient as it saves having to establish a relationship with yet another bank, ID, address etc, especially the smaller players. Sometimes the rates are better than going direct, sometimes they're not in which case I would pass. Where the rates are the same I would use HL for the lack of faff

I prefer being able to use a debit card for deposits and the money is available straight away. Withdrawals are pretty quick as well. One minor irritation is that you usually have to wait a few days between depositing your cash and it being transferred to the selected savings product but that's the nature of the beast as they batch them all up and transfer in one go. Another small annoyance is that if you have an Active Savings product the inactivity timeout reduces to about 5 minutes instead of up to an hour. Easily overcome with a tab refresh add on in Firefox

colsten

I am not considering myself dodgy, have however got an HL Active Savings account. It's essentially dormant now as all their rates can be beaten. As and if they offer any market-leading rates, or any bonus offers, again, I'll be back in a flash.

Single annual tax statements, even if they do them, don't do anything for me as I record all transactions in AceMoney and have all my interest added up automatically. HMRC have never asked me to see any confirmation from the providers and seem to be happy with just the bottom line number (which nearly tallied with the numbers HMRC had reported by the providers, when they were still allowing us to see what providers report to them).

Dandytf

I started HL's active savings recently, unintentially resulted opened 2 6 month fixed accounts with Standard Charter.
HL's 'hub' where deposits are held still shows a 'Transfer' tab, though with me forgetting no further funds can be 'Tranaferred' from hub to Savings I've inadvertently opened a second fixed savings account.
My only critisicm is the 'Transfer' tab/option shouldn't be available when savings accounts do not allow it as per Account type.