First timer having trouble with LISAs, HTBs & proof.

B0bbyEwing

Relative is about to purchase their first house. 
Seems to be doing it a little different to what I did. I had one guy (an IFA) who did the lot for me. Told me what to do & when & I just did it. 

Stupidly she's mentioned the LISA & HTB ISA which has caused confusion. Now this woman wont let go of this HTB ISA & is advising her to seek financial advice from her mortgage broker.

????????

What she's been doing is pulling money out of her HTB over the years & putting it in to her LISA to the point her LISA is 15.5k vs 2.5k in the HTB. I said to just use the LISA, withdraw the HTB money from the account (sure, there'll be no bonus) & put that towards as well (as she wants to use the lot as a deposit anyway).

Are you not allowed to do that because this woman seems very confused by it?
I'll stress - I'm not talking about using 2 lots of bonuses. If you came to that conclusion then just re-read what I just said because it's clearly not that.

Potential problem is this woman is wanting proof of all the transactions showing a trail of where her deposit came from.
Thing is, over the years, so many accounts have been opened & closed with no record of what they were once closed. 

To what degree do they want proof of origin of funds? If they want you to be able to trail every last penny back then that just can't happen. There's too many transactions, too many opened & closed accounts. It'd be like police detective work going back years & years.


I do remember I had a bit of bother myself as I was cycling money around & opening accounts left & right.
Add to that the fact that I saved a deposit that wasn't in line with my low wage & they raised eyebrows.

But I explained to my IFA everything I was doing - chasing every last percentage rise in interest, every last few pence on an offer, to build a big a deposit as possible, all the cycling money etc. He just told the bank he'd be taking all his business elsewhere if they didn't play ball & that seemed to get it sorted. 


So yeah, from this thread - is she fine to combine the Lifetime ISA with cash withdrawn from a savings account and to what extreme does she need to prove how she formed her deposit?

onetimeatponycamp

My solicitors wanted 6 months evidence of deposit. Because I'd moved money around quite a bit between accounts in that time I sent them statements for 6 months for all the accounts, and then I did them a spreadsheet showing where I transferred things to/from to speed things up for them.

B0bbyEwing

onetimeatponycamp said:

My solicitors wanted 6 months evidence of deposit. Because I'd moved money around quite a bit between accounts in that time I sent them statements for 6 months for all the accounts, and then I did them a spreadsheet showing where I transferred things to/from to speed things up for them.

I asked who this confused woman is. Turns out it's the solicitor who's getting all confused by Lifetime ISAs and HTB ISAs and suggesting relative seeks deposit advice from a mortgage broker.

Put simply, she's saying get advice over whether using 15k is better than using 2k. Not sure why someone would need advice on that.

Anyway, hopefully she doesn't need to produce evidence of every last penny because if so then that's just not happening. She wouldn't know what accounts were even in place at the time.

Could say better records need to be kept and probably accurate, but it can't be undone now.