Legal and General ISA cashback

RoxieW

Hi all

First post on this savings thread!

I have £2000 to invest and was looking to open a legal and general ISA as they offer £110 cashback through Quidco. However, their ISA's dont seem to be straight forward ie they dont earn set rate of interest. I was looking at the index tracker ISA but it all seems a bit confusing to me. Can anyone help? They seem a bit risky. I was thinking of just depositing the minimum of £500 to get the cashback and then putting the rest elsewhere -but I guess cashback has no purpose if they lose my money? Does it look like a fairly safe bet or not?


Thanks guys

RoxieW

sorry, heres the link

http://www.legalandgeneral.com/investments/isas/

Milarky

Most recently raised as a topic here

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=652035

But there is a much longer thread dating back to last June somewhere.

If you are nervous about your investment then go for the monthly option instead

dunstonh

However, their ISA's dont seem to be straight forward ie they dont earn set rate of interest.

Thats because they are stocks and shares ISAs. You dont get interest on those (although you do on some funds but you shouldnt confuse those with cash ISAs).

I was looking at the index tracker ISA but it all seems a bit confusing to me. Can anyone help? They seem a bit risky.

Which index tracker? Yes they do contain an element of risk and for someone starting their first investment (I make that assumption based on the way you have posted) then it wouldnt make a good investment. FTSE all share tracker would be around risk 7 on a 1-10 scale.

Aegis

RoxieW wrote: »

Hi all

First post on this savings thread!

I have £2000 to invest and was looking to open a legal and general ISA as they offer £110 cashback through Quidco. However, their ISA's dont seem to be straight forward ie they dont earn set rate of interest. I was looking at the index tracker ISA but it all seems a bit confusing to me. Can anyone help? They seem a bit risky. I was thinking of just depositing the minimum of £500 to get the cashback and then putting the rest elsewhere -but I guess cashback has no purpose if they lose my money? Does it look like a fairly safe bet or not?

Thanks guys

First things first, welcome to the area!

You should be aware that a tracker ISA can very easily lose money in the short run, though it is very likely to grow in the long run, with the exception of a few rare cases like someone investing in a tech stock index tracker just before the dotcom bubble burst.

If you're happy with that risk, you should look around for a provider that you're comfortable with. Stocks and shares ISAs are many orders of magnitude more complicated than simple cash ISAs, especially if you want the freedom to pick the stocks that sit in the ISA yourself. Essentially you are allowed to add anything from Gilts to shares to collective investments into your ISA, and it will then be exempt from any Capital Gains Tax or additional income tax on dividends. Certainly a nice advantage, but the key issue to remember is that this is fundamentally a stocks and shares investment with a nice tax wrapper. As such, you should most definitely decide for yourself what your investment strategy is before you hand anyone money to invest for you.

There's a lot more information in this area about stocks and shares, and you should read through some of it and decide for yourself if this is the right thing for you to do with your money.

As for my personal opinion, I love the investment game, but I went for a self-service ISA without cashback and have already made more than the cashback offer by picking funds that have performed better than the FTSE indices. As such, I wouldn't let the cashback offer blind you to the other options out there, though obviously there is no guarantee that you'll match that in the short run.

Best of luck with the research!