Investment bond

kitty5 · 2 March at 9:18PM

hi all, any help would be greatly appreciated.
my husband took out an investment bond in 1998 with Halifax as he had an inheritance of 16500 to invest. Over the years we haven’t really looked at it at all. Now that he is close to retirement we are now looking at cashing it in over the next few years in the most tax efficient way. It is now worth around £53000. What would be the best thing for us to do?
Please can you explain in the most simple terms.. thanks in advance for any help.

dunstonh · 2 March at 9:42PM

Investment bonds are more complex and you need to be careful to not create a tax bill unecessarily (as it can usually be easily avoided). That may mean partially surrendering it over multiple tax years.

As for what the best thing to do is, that is impossible to answer with limited info. Effectively, you have asked us to give you a solution to a scenario, but not told us anything about the scenario.

DRS1 · 2 March at 11:16PM

There is a thread here on what may be a similar thing. In the thread I post a link to some explanatory stuff which may be applicable to the bond your husband has. Have a read of that to see if it is what he has and if it helps with taking payments out. The thread also has useful post by @poseidon1 which may give you some pointers for things to think about.

Scottish Widows Personal Investment plan - gifted by late father, tax implications? — MoneySavingExpert Forum

kitty5 · 3 March at 2:00AM

Thank you both so much. I will take a look.

jimjames · 3 March at 10:25AM

he had an inheritance of 16500 to invest. Over the years we haven’t really looked at it at all. It is now worth around £53000.

Hopefully you get it sorted but this really does show the benefits of long term investments. By holding on and not constantly checking the value every day and keeping invested through the dotcom crash, wars, global financial crisis and covid you've more than tripled your investment which is a good result!