Child trust fund investment

lennyb15

My son recieved £250 for his CTF which we did nothing with until recently.

I went through OneFamily and got the fund moved to their CTF product, but when it was moved it was still £250, I thought it would have been invested somewhere for the 14 years prior and be more than that. 

Is that not the case if it was untouched from the beginning, should there be some investment gains on the £250?

TIA

daveyjp

Any investment decisions would have been down to the recipient of the original £250, usually a parent.  Our daughter received the initial £250, we added to it over the years and return over 18 years was about 30%.

lennyb15

So our assumption that we got the £250 already added to an investment vehicle was wrong, what we got was £250 ready to move into an investment? There's not a default investment vehicle if we didn't choose to move it elsewhere?

Alexland

 lennyb15 said:

My son recieved £250 for his CTF which we did nothing with until recently.

If the £250 voucher was not used within a year then a CTF account would have been opened with a government chosen provider and and some of the default fund choices were low return / high fees.

lennyb15 said:

I went through OneFamily and got the fund moved to their CTF product

Do you mean you have only just transferred to Onefamily? Where was it before that? Or maybe you just transferred it from a Onefamily CTF to JISA? Was the transfer value exactly £250 to the penny? I suggest you ask the provider it was with for 14 years for an explanation of why it has not grown.

artyboy

I know we are all clued up geniuses in savings and investments on here, but it really does mystify me how people can pay no attention at all to what they have and how it is managed for the best part of 2 decades...

lennyb15

Alexland said:

 lennyb15 said:

My son recieved £250 for his CTF which we did nothing with until recently.

If the £250 voucher was not used within a year then a CTF account would have been opened with a government chosen provider and and some of the default fund choices were low return / high fees.

lennyb15 said:

I went through OneFamily and got the fund moved to their CTF product

Do you mean you have only just transferred to Onefamily? Where was it before that? Or maybe you just transferred it from a Onefamily CTF to JISA? Was the transfer value exactly £250 to the penny? I suggest you ask the provider it was with for 14 years for an explanation of why it has not grown.

It would have been with the default government scheme then. When I applied to move it to the Onefamily CTF exactly £250 came over. 

Would I contact the gov department to find out what they did with it as the default action?

artyboy

As a minor data point, coincidentally one of my daughters' BF was talking about his CTF - similar situation, parents did b@gger all with it, but now he's 18, it does appear to have grown to about £800. So you might have hoped that even with total inertia for 18 years, some reasonable growth could have been achieved...

Alexland

lennyb15 said:

It would have been with the default government scheme then. When I applied to move it to the Onefamily CTF exactly £250 came over. 

I don't understand how you applied to move it to Onefamily if you didn't know who the previous government chosen provider was?

It sounds like you just somehow opened a new account without doing a transfer?

Did you use this tool to find the existing provider?
https://www.gov.uk/child-trust-funds/find-a-child-trust-fund

Have you tried asking Onefamily what they think has happened?