Investment & Investing

Anyone got a SIPP platform they like? At the end of the tax year I usually put excess savings into my work pension as a lump sum, but work moved us to Scottish Windows this year and they don’t seem to allow that.

My ISA is with iWeb but the £90 fee seems high for the smaller amounts I’ll be adding.

When I was looking it seemed to be Vanguard are cheapest to begin with ii are reasonable overall if you don't trade a lot, AJ Bell and Hargreaves good for larger or regular trading.

I might have that wrong though. There are quite a few YT videos covering the subject.

I like ii but don't know any of the others.

Just to throw Monzo into the mix who currently offer 4.58% next day withdrawal if placed in their savings ‘pots’. I use one of these for a similar purpose.

That seems odd that the pension provider wouldn’t allow cash deposits - are you sure?

I have monzo so just opened one and I get 4.1%. I think higher rates need a premium account.

Tide seems to be paying 5%

GBP only?

This is great.
The majority of my pots are medium term savings (pot for Xmas costs, pot for holiday savings, pot for kids birthdays etc)
Chuffed they are now getting 4.58% instead of just sitting in a vanilla pot

Dear All, My wife and I are part of the same pension scheme as we have the same employer (it is the USS university pension). She is full time and I am part-time. We aren't doing great / aren't happy and are looking to get out. Is there a way in which I can elect to roll my pension into hers and bring her pension forward, so to speak? Sorry if that is not clear, I don't actually know what I am asking. I realise we can't magically add 30 years to someone’s age but wondered if there were any clever options.

My original thought was to use OpenBanking on something like Monzo/Revolut and see what options there were to export from there. Alternative is to capture phone notifications and use Tasker to upload details to a Google Sheet or similar but I'd need to spend some time working out how standard the various notifications are so seems a hassle.

Moneyhub looks interesting though, may give it a try.

From my recollection, Vanguard's % based fees are likely to be the cheapest of the big players until you start getting over six figures, provided you are happy with Vanguard products. Then worth looking to switch to ii, iWeb, AJB etc. Vanguard don't have an app and web functionality isn't as nice as ii/HL, but you will be used to that if you have an iWeb ISA.

Monevator have a useful table that is kept up to date, although takes a bit of reading because of the all the options.

Chase paying something like 4.7% and chip are along the same lines, all instant withdrawal.

Website says contact my company, company HR have no clue. It’s possible I could do it over the phone but honestly f*** that!

Will likely go with Vanguard, thanks for the reminder of the Monevator comparison tool @jamesl

I made a Google sheet which gives me a dashboard.

Every account has its own tab. For credit cards, current accounts and savings accounts, the tab has 2 areas, a “summary” and an area I can just dump the export from the app or website as most do a csv export. Summary area just has Starting Balance (at start of tax year) and current balance, which is calculated from the data dumped in. Each bank has its own export format but most give you a money in/out column so it’s easy to calculate balance. I also have extra columns for spending categories, some accounts I add that manually but some like Monzo do it in the app and the export data contains that field.

Investment accounts and pensions have summary area with starting balance/current balance, then a row per month with monthly balance (I update once a month on pay day). Some accounts I also have a split between bonds/funds/stocks/other.

I then have a dashboard tab which summarises all the accounts into one table to show total balance per account type. It also has payslip info so I can see tax paid etc.

I have another tab which shows spending per category over all accounts, basically by doing a pivot table over current account and credit card sheets.

Sounds complicated but only took a couple hours to set up and takes me about half an hour per month to update. I looked into more automated methods but not all accounts support stuff like that so it didn’t seem worth the effort. I think Monzo allows automatic exports into Google sheets but it might be a premium feature.

Monument doing 5.11% easy access - instant and unlimited withdrawals or 5.13-5.17% on notice accounts (7, 35, 45 or 60 days)

You do have to have £25K with them

I don't think you can donate your pension to your wife. I was in the USS but that was a while ago, they had some rules then about having to see an advisor before doing anything.

I got a job in the NHS and the whole USS pension was transferred to them.

hello midlife, thank you. it’s interesting, it seems from google plenty of people- across different situations- are asking the question but the answer is no. maybe this should be a thing?

Can't ever see it as being a thing. Pensions are too intertwined with individual tax allowances/etc.

There'd also be huge scope for coercion and scamming if it was possible to transfer pensions between people.

Cheers. I'm pretty happy working with it once I have some data but it's the getting data out that is the main issue for me. I've got 4 or 5 main accounts/cards and I don't really want to be having to go round all of them, export the data and paste it into other files/file it into the correct folder.

I expect so

Not investing as such but no better switch offer around than the NatWest one, right

Been with Nationwide for a few years and whilst it's fine I feel like £200 free money is hard to turn down

I've looked at this fund, did a bit of research and put part of my ISA into it. If it's cheaper and better performing than VWRP, how come more people don't default to it? Are there other factors I'm overlooking?
I know past performance is not an indicator of future performance etc and this is an internet forum for bikes so I shouldn't be looking for advice on here.

Interesting article - everybody is deserting UK funds.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-equity-dark-age-reflects-alarming-desertion-mike-dolan-2024-03-08/?ref=upstract.com

LONDON, March 8 (Reuters) - If the British government is trying to steer more domestic investors back into unloved UK stocks, it has a mammoth task on its hands given the scale of the desertion over recent years.
In his budget speech this week, finance minister Jeremy Hunt unveiled a new "UK ISA", or Individual Savings Account, that allows individuals to invest 5,000 pounds ($6,403) tax-free in UK equities annually, in addition to the 20,000 pounds allowed under existing tax-free ISA schemes.
Hunt reckoned this meant that "British savers can benefit from the growth of the most promising UK businesses as well as supporting them with the capital to help them expand".
Downplaying the impact of the tweak, many experts reckoned the added incentive to stay local would only likely appeal to a small proportion of investors already maxed out on ISA limits.
But what it did serve to do is spotlight just how increasingly unwanted British stocks are even among Britons - who, unlike Americans for example, appear to be abandoning any sense of 'home bias' as they drift away from actively managed UK funds to cheaper and more globally-spread index trackers.
A spiral seems to have ensued as persistently lagging UK performance merely tempts savers further into overseas funds - cutting demand for new UK equity fund launches, which have dwindled in favour of shiny new global offerings instead.
The problems of the British economy over the past decade are well documented of course - not least due to outsize hits from the banking crash of 2008, the protracted and messy exit from the European Union, and the pandemic and subsequent energy shock more recently.
For many global fund managers, UK exposure has become a far less significant part of portfolios and many even bat away questions on the whys and wherefores of British markets.
At its most basic, the startling underperformance of both the blue-chip FTSE100 (.FTSE)
, opens new tab index of largely globally-exposed UK stocks and the FTSE250 (.FTMC)
, opens new tab index of mid-sized domestic-facing stocks over the past decade speaks volumes.
In sterling terms, both the FTSE100 and FTSE250 have gained a meagre 13-17% over the past 10 years compared to the 260% boom in Wall Street's S&P500 (.SPX)
, opens new tab, a near quintupling of the tech-laden Nasdaq (.IXIC), opens new tab, a 140% rise in Japan's Nikkei (.N225), opens new tab and even a 62% jump in the euro zone benchmark (.STOXXE)
, opens new tab.
While those major markets surge anew since 2022's interest rate setbacks, UK indexes are still in negative territory for the past 12 months - and also for 2024 to date.
The valuation discount of the FTSE All-Share index (.FTAS)
, opens new tab versus MSCI's World index (.MIWO00000PUS)
, opens new tab is now at a record near 40%, and UK weightings in that World index have more than halved to just 4% over the past 15 years.
It may be 'cheap' of course - but investment flows are streaming in the other direction.

"EXISTENTIAL CRISIS"
Numbers released by the Invest Association on Thursday show the scale of what's happening.
UK savers took 24.3 billion pounds out of all funds in 2023 - the second consecutive year of net withdrawals and the only two such years ever recorded. The relative attraction of higher interest rates in cash savings accounts was partly to blame.
But the really alarming bit is a record 14 billion pound exit from UK equity funds - the eighth straight negative year since the Brexit vote in 2016, outstripping a dire 2022 outcome and continuing a bleed that long precedes the recent rise in interest rates.
While there was some switching to money market and fixed income funds last year, index tracking funds also saw a healthy 13.8 billion of inflows.
It's the whopping 38 billion pound record outflow from actively-managed UK funds that's particularly stark.
And it didn't end last year. Net retail and institutional fund sales of the 1.42 trillion pound industry were both negative at more than a billion pounds each again for January.
"The UK funds industry is going through a dark age," said Laith Khalaf, AJ Bell's head of investment analysis, commenting on the IA figures. "The scale of these withdrawals is absolutely unprecedented."
"This doesn't augur well for confidence in the UK stock market, which is leaking members and performance to overseas competitors," he said, adding that it was an "existential crisis" for UK active funds, where less than a third have outperformed passive equivalents over the past 10 years.
That "crisis" partly reflects worldwide changes in asset management trends toward passive, process-driven and more global strategies - and an exit of many 'star' fund managers from the UK scene. Rising annuity sales, which jumped 46% last year, may also have taken from those seeking UK equities in pension pots.
But there's a clear unwinding of 'home bias' among British investors too, Khalaf noted, showing the share of UK equities in the average balance fund has almost halved since 2009 to just 27% while U.S. equity holdings more than trebled to 39%.
The mere 4% weighting of UK equity in the MSCI World could spell much further reductions ahead if the global index tracking boom continues.
And to the extent that higher interest rates may have exaggerated the issue over the past couple of years, hopes for rate cuts ahead seem unlikely to give the UK much of an advantage over anywhere else this year.
The Bank of England is currently expected to start cutting rates later than its U.S. or euro zone counterparts, around August at current pricing, and also deliver fewer cuts over the course of the year.
Tweaking ISA rules won't do any harm of course, but may just be a cotton wool ball to soak up a flood.

Yeah, I don't see much point to invest in the UK economy, most profit will be probably extracted
by multinationals anyway and the domestic market has decades of decline ahead of it.

I've been rejigging my pension - to bin the UK tracker funds based on the above! I'll switch to a global tracker - a few years too late, but probably better than never.

Is it OK to just put everything in one fund, eg HSBC FTSE All-World Index, which Monervator reckons is the best / cheapest one, or is it a thing to split it between a few, in case HSBC goes under?