Ok, so who are you all using for the passive stuff?

Best I can tell, Fidelity want to charge me £90 a year to do it with them.  Also, there will be some months where I can't contribute so don't want that causing issues as well.

But only if you're going to contribute monthly.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

There are plenty of options for passive. Check out moneysavingsexpert stacks and shares isas. You should do passive.

What if you're a top?

The thing is: you need to think provider / platform, then fund. Both attract separate costs.

Fidelity are charging you a platform / management fee £90 a year which, on a portfolio worth say £5000, is 1.8%, which is a huge ripoff and you must move.

There are tons of Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP) platforms out there:
AJ Bell
Vanguard
PensionBee
Hargreaves Lansdown
Interactive Investors
iWeb
etc

for the most part, any decent platform will provide access to a wide range of funds (passive, tracker funds included, as well as rip-off actively managed funds and individual shares, bonds, gilts (government bonds), and so on). Generally, they will charge for trading / investing in shares and other items, and funds (even trackers) will have ongoing management fees associated with investing in them, to the tune of 0.1%-whatever%)

so the trick is to get a cheap platform (because they're all about the same, really, given wide access to funds and investments), then get a cheap tracker which covers a wide enough range of equity to offset risk (ie: a S&P500 tracker or similar).

If you want my recommendation, as I said disclaimer cos I invest in them, but I use pensionbee, they aren't the absolute cheapest but close enough (their tracker fund, at 0.5% annual fee to include all costs, is almost there but I invest in their Impact plan which is more expensive, but avoids any investment in fossil fuels / weapons / other nasty shit, and actively invests in companies trying to solve social and technical problems). they've got a nice app, a realistic-ish and easy to use retirement planner, and I like them.

Vanguard, as well as being a provider, also offer their own funds (in fact this is really their core business), and their tracker funds are very cheap and offer a wide range of investment opportunities. they'd be my second choice - as provider and funds choice.

But check out the other main providers, find the cheapest management / platform fee (typically they're around 0.45% per year), then buy a cheap tracker fund specialising in US equity, then you're done.

Neat table from Which? Money! You can see that Vanguard are the cheapest here from a platform perspective, although Interactive Investor run them close and are cheaper if you end up saving more than £100K lol and you may prefer their app / website.

Fund costs will be the same. Usually free to invest in and then annual fees of between about 0.1% and upwards as I said

Also those of you still with Hargreaves Lansdown lol

td

Wait. Stocks and shares ISAs are different from Self Invested Pensions Plans. But largely same thing: a platform fee plus ongoing fund fees / ad-hoc trading fees.

Vanguard is cheap yes. Not a proper platform, I should say, cos only access to their funds but their funds are cheap and good, so no bother for me.

There are new players out there who don’t charge but could be risky. Check out this page on money savings expert: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/stocks-shares-isas/#doityourself

At the start of the thread, the chat was all about Stocks and shares S&P 500 wrapped up in an ISA.

Has everyone moved on to SIPPs?  

I should have got involved at the start.  I'm always two steps behind.

Matt_82 wrote:

At the start of the thread, the chat was all about Stocks and shares S&P 500 wrapped up in an ISA. Has everyone moved on to SIPPs?   I should have got involved at the start.  I'm always two steps behind.

I think the original advice in the thread still stands. S&P 500 wrapped up in an ISA is great. It's just that some of us (myself included) have the kinds of pension that lets us invest in the funds we want, so it makes sense to do it that way (also, I don't have much disposable income to put into an ISA after tax/bills etc).

My plan is to leave it since I know fuck all about trading.  That part is the easy part, tbh. I'd be worse than a man down in the stock market.

If I stuck £1000 in it and left it for 20 years, what could I expect to have by then? £2000? £5000? 3 million? 

What makes the monthly investments essential?

Matt_82 wrote:

My plan is to leave it since I know fuck all about trading.  That part is the easy part, tbh. I'd be worse than a man down in the stock market.

If I stuck £1000 in it and left it for 20 years, what could I expect to have by then? £2000? £5000? 3 million? 

What makes the monthly investments essential?

If you did the same, but stuck £100 a month in too, it would be £53,030.31

Got an email cos my previous work's pension providers just averaged the growth of two funds and days everyone made that gain, even though different people had different amounts in each. Whoops. So now they're recalculating things, she the figure I saw recently it's likely wrong (unclear in which direction...).

That's with Ascott Lloyd. New one is with Smart Pensions. Don't really know if either is any good!

acemuzzy wrote:

Both pension pot and ISA are tax free in terms of CGT, right?

Correct. No CGT on either, but pensions are subject to income tax at the point of drawdown.

I didn't get much further than last month when i was thinking about setting up on a new platform to do automatic monthly additions. Currently with iweb but not doing regular additions, cos t doesn't support automatic and i think costs £5 per transaction which is a bit much on £50!

The one that caught my eye from the money supermarket link was trading212 which doesn't seem to charge anything...anyone any thoughts or experience with that?
Had a look at the site but not sure if their selection of funds was quite limited as couldn't find what i currently have

It should never cost anything to put monthly payments into an existing fund. A transaction cost usually means switching a fund because you want a new thing, which should never happen if you're just invested in a cheap S&P fund. Costs are about leaving, switching - not putting into an existing fund. if you're switching funds away from a cheap tracker you're not doing it right anyways.