Hi Philip,

A good question and one that often pops up!

Transferring ISAs

Generally the transfer process is fairly straight forward, especially when transferring between two online providers. You can transfer a Stocks & Shares ISA and a Junior ISA (JISA) without losing any of the tax benefits and the transfer of an existing ISA / JISA does not count towards your annual allowance.

Your annual ISA allowance

As you may be aware, the overall ISA allowance for 2019/20 is £20,000, which covers contributions to Cash ISAs, Stocks & Shares ISAs, Innovative Finance ISAs and Lifetime ISAs (LISA).

You are able to split your ISA allowance across the different ISA types, however you are correct that you would only be able to contribute to one of each type of ISA per tax year (i.e. you could split your allowance between one Cash ISA and one Stocks & Shares ISA, but not between two Stocks & Shares ISAs).

The 2019/20 JISA allowance is £4,368, and can be split between a Junior Cash ISA or Junior Stocks & Shares ISA.

However, for Junior ISAs you are only able to hold one of each type of ISA across all tax years.

Different Providers

As you have mentioned Vanguard I have attached a link to their transfer process here.

There are a few things you should be aware of:

• The value of your ISA opened during the current tax year must be transferred in full. You will also be able to elect to transfer any ISA holdings from previous tax years (if applicable).
• Junior ISAs must always be transferred in full (whenever opened) as a child can only have one Junior Stocks & Shares ISA at any one time.
• Assuming you were to complete your transfer from Wealthsimple to Vanguard, if you hold Vanguard funds within your existing ISA/JISA, you can generally transfer these funds without the need to sell them (this is sometimes called re-registration). If your existing funds are not available via Vanguard, the holdings would have to be sold and transferred as cash within the ISA. This would lead to you being temporarily out of the market.
• The time frames to complete an ISA transfer will be dependent upon your existing provider. If it takes longer than 30 working days, you can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

As with any transfer, you should consider any transfer costs or penalties from your existing provider as well as any initial or set up charges on the new ISA. You should also consider the difference in ongoing charges between both providers, to include any ISA ‘product’ charge and fund management charges. The value of your investments can fluctuate and there is no guarantee the new ISA/JISA will provide a better return than your existing provider.

I hope this helps,

Tommy

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We are not regulated to give personal financial advice - This isn’t full-fat regulated financial advice. Boring Money is a publisher and not regulated by the FCA. 

This means we can't help with specific personal circumstances or recommend specific investment products. It also basically means that if we say something daft, you have no recourse to come back and complain.

We’re only allowed to give you a steer or share an opinion or tell you the facts - That said, we promise that our answer to you is an independent unbiased perspective with no commercial gain to make. If you need regulated financial advice, you can find a good adviser via sites such as Unbiased & Vouchedfor.

Hi Joy,

Great to hear that you're eager start investing, and are particularly interested in ethical/socially responsible investing. 

This is an area of the investment world that has been seeing a lot of interest recently. More platforms are introducing ethical ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) options for their customers to choose from.

Why invest ethically?

There are many naysayers who dislike ethical investing because they feel that, while being a nice tree-hugging hippy thing to do, your investment returns will be poorer for it. However with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning in October 2018, that we only have 12 years to bring global warming under control and avoid a 'climate catastrophe' - the support for ethical is growing. 

As is the performance of the ethical options which already exist. If we look at three different funds ranging from ethical to not-so-ethical, we can see that ethical performance has been on the up ever since 2014. (For more detail - take a look at our full article).

• FTSE4Good Global - which only includes socially responsible businesses
• FTSE All Share - which tracks the entire investment market: good, bad and ugly
• The Vice Fund - which invests in tobacco, gambling, booze and weapons

While the Vice Fund doubled investors’ money in its first five years (2002–2007), by the start of 2019 the FTSE4Good was the leading fund of these three. It even beat the benchmark set by the all-encompassing FTSE All Share.

This just goes to show the naysayers, that you don’t have to sacrifice returns anymore to invest in the future of the planet. But then again, nothing with the stock market is ever certain.

More info on ethical investing

As we are pretty interested in ethical investing here at Boring Money (having written a report all about it in 2018), our Best Buys page and a few of our articles might be helpful to you. Why not take a look at:

Our Best Buys page - use our 'ethical investments' filter to whittle down the list providers to just those who market their own ethical options. As of April 2019, the only providers on our Best Buys page who offer ethical options are: Vanguard, Nutmeg, Wealthify, PensionBee, Barclays Smart Investor, Wealthsimple, and Moola.

Of these ethical options, we review all seven as suitable for beginner investors. However you can filter them again, using other filters such as: 'Low cost for small portfolios (<50k)' and 'Start with £100 or less', to find the best providers for you to explore further.

• Ethical Investing: What is it? And who’s doing it?
• Holly's blog: Ethical investing. Fad or the future?
• Good vs Evil: You'd be a fool to rule out ethical investing

How to compare 'socially responsible' criteria

There is a lot of confusion about what counts as 'socially responsible', ‘ethical’ or 'ESG'. Some of this is due to the fact that one person’s ethics are not always in line with another’s.

• Negative screening - Most investors think of ethical investing as just blacklisting certain types of companies or industries from their portfolio - according to our research, consumers most want to avoid: arms, tobacco, gambling and pornography.
• Impact investing – where money is actively funnelled towards certain projects to support positive change – is less recognised, but once offered to people it is more popular than blacklisting. Our survey respondents named healthcare, green energy and sustainable agriculture as the areas they most wanted to see their money put to positive use.

Unfortunately, because of the relative youth of ethical investing, and all the confusion over how to define 'ethical' options, there is currently no easy way to compare the ethical options out there. Beyond reading up on them and doing your homework, there's no quick way to see at a glance how one ethical investing option differs from another. You just need to comb through the details yourself, and see how these ethical options measure up to your ideas of what 'ethical investing' means.

This being said, Morningstar are working toward creating a tool which could be really helpful for investors who'd like to do this. And we are hoping to have the functionality to help readers compare ethical investing products in the future. Unfortunately though, these projects are still in development.

Meanwhile, some investment platforms such as Fidelity, do offer investors helpful info to help them find out more about the ethical funds on their platform.

Take a look at the bottom of this page, to see the top 10 most bought and sold ESG funds on the Fidelity website in February 2019: www.fidelity.co.uk/funds/esg-investing

Hope this helps!

Phoebe

Just be aware...

We are not regulated to give personal financial advice - This isn’t full-fat regulated financial advice. Boring Money is a publisher and not regulated by the FCA. 

This means we can't help with specific personal circumstances or recommend specific investment products. It also basically means that if we say something daft, you have no recourse to come back and complain.

We’re only allowed to give you a steer or share an opinion or tell you the facts - That said, we promise that our answer to you is an independent unbiased perspective with no commercial gain to make. If you need regulated financial advice, you can find a good adviser via sites such as Unbiased & Vouchedfor.

£25 to £50 a month at 24 is brilliant! And most people don’t invest for anything specific – just a general desire to build a stash and to do better than cash.

You have 2 options. You either pick a low-cost robo or a fund like Vanguard LifeStrategy. Or you pick a blend of pricier active funds which have the chance of doing better but no guarantees – and will cost you more.

Without sounding like a patronising old fart, you have years ahead of you to find out more about investing if you want to. So I would start with the easiest option. Once you’ve become Georgina Soros in 10 years time, you can start to spice things up a bit. 

For me, I would pick the best combo of ease and cost. And that is a Vanguard ISA.

Trouble is they want at least £100 a month or a lump sum of £500. So you need £500 to start with and then a direct debit to set up maybe quarterly. A bit time consuming – so it depends how organised you are. 

If you go down the LifeStrategy fund route, you will need to choose which one. They have 5 choices – from the blandest most cash-like one which won't shoot the lights out, but won’t give you any nasty surprises either. To the 100% equity one, which is the most likely to bounce up and down.

Will you really need the money in 5 years, or are you just saying this because it’s as far ahead as you can envisage right now?

I ask that because if you think it’s longer, then think about the 100% equity one. I have this in my pension, as it’s sitting there and I don’t particularly mind if it tanks one year because I'm pretty confident it will come back up. 

But if it is a 5 year timeframe, then you might want to consider the 60% or 80% equity options. These will probably make less than the 100% over the very long-term, but be better protected against slumps when – as is inevitable – markets have a fall.

Another option is a group like Wealthify – they will charge you up to about 0.9% a year, but you can start from just £1 and add small amounts monthly. They are smaller and don’t have a long track record, but the large stake which household brand Aviva has in them gives comfort. It will likely be easier to set up regular smaller contributions here and automate it all, which is much less of a faff.

I would say that both of these options are fine.

The main thing is just to get into the markets with a diversified mix of stuff, and not pay too much. People spends years procrastinating and worrying, and then miss out.

Read more about robos

• Robo adviser - Investing guide
• Robo adviser performance 2018

Just be aware...

We are not regulated to give personal financial advice - This isn’t full-fat regulated financial advice. Boring Money is a publisher and not regulated by the FCA. 

This means we can't help with specific personal circumstances or recommend specific investment products. It also basically means that if we say something daft, you have no recourse to come back and complain.

We’re only allowed to give you a steer or share an opinion or tell you the facts - That said, we promise that our answer to you is an independent unbiased perspective with no commercial gain to make. If you need regulated financial advice, you can find a good adviser via sites such as Unbiased & Vouchedfor.