Question Of The Week: How many cash ISAs can I have?

Former_MSE_Penelope · 15 June 2010 at 8:37PM

Q. [FONT=&quot]Can a person hold cash ISAs with more than one provider? Some good deals won't allow transfers in. So, either one can have more than one provider, or such reasonable offers aren't reasonable? Joy, by email[/FONT]

Martin's A: [FONT=&quot]This is a common confusion. The you can only have one cash ISA rule only applies to the current tax year only. So you can have lots of different Cash ISAs for lots of different tax years.

Thus if you want to open a new cash ISA for the 2010-11 year, you needn't do it with the same provider as you've opened ISAs with in previous years.

There's also nothing stopping you opening one cash ISA for new money, and a separate one to transfer prior years' cash ISAs (as long as none of this years cash goes in). [/FONT]

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Paul_Herring · 16 June 2010 at 8:28AM

MSE_Penelope wrote: »

There's also nothing stopping you opening one cash ISA for new money, and a separate one to transfer prior years' cash ISAs (as long as none of this years cash goes in).

Misleading.

There's nothing (in HMRC's rules) stopping you subsequently transferring this year's money into the second account, as long as it gets transferred together (and any further contributions this year go into the same account.)

Milarky · 16 June 2010 at 9:20AM

Also, any existing (past years) open ISAs can be transferred to two or more providers - thus ISA 'splitting' is available. This is possible because (in general) ISA providers allow partial transfers of past years amounts - although they have discretion - and ISA transfer rules certainly permit transfer of only part of a balance elsewhere. Splitting can also result from opening two or more products with the same provider.

Question Of The Week: How many cash ISAs can I have?

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