Lots of chat about fees now Plus is a thing. I was wondering if some people could post or point to fees of competitors? I was putting together a small table to compare fees and the size of your holding before Freetrade is more value (based on fees alone).
Fixed fees are generally seen are more beneficial in the long run, simpler, and easier to manage, but % based fees tend to be good for small portfolios, something Vanguard takes advantage of for example.
I’ve only got HL and Vanguard at the moment. but i want to build up a table that compares more than just fees and takes into consideration other limitations and options. Figured id gather some input so i can expand on the table.
Ah yeah i remember that. I’ll use it as a base. It doesn’t i’ve you the tip over balance where a broker becomes cheaper so still some value to it (tbh im just personally interested to see what the various thresholds are in comparison to Freetrade anyway)
Nice idea, it might be worth breaking it out by investment style as well, just because Vanguard for example only really caters to passive investors also prices vary dramatically between the two.
FT is very good value for passive investors because you just have a flat platform fee + fund ongoing charges.
FT is less great for active investors / traders (except for those mostly picking UK product) because it becomes a percentage fee rather than a flat fee.
Yeah I was going to consider how best to do this. Possibly split it out into ‘investment styles’
Vanguard GIA for example is more expensive once you put more than £1 in as all of the vanguard funds are free in Freetrade (no counting the fund fee) so a passive investor who doesn’t want an ISA may be better riff with Freetrade from the get go, plus they’re still not locked into vanguard funds.
So there’s a few scenarios to think about, i think these are often overlooked.
They charge £25 to join (used to be free) and then no ongoing charges and £5/trade regardless of whether you have a dealing account and/or ISA or both.
For SIPPs, it’s slightly different with no joining fee but a quarterly admin charge of £22.50 for SIPPs valued up to £50,000 and £45 for all other SIPPs.
Pensionbee offer a tracker fund pension that charges as low as 0.5% but also offer other pots that can charge as high as 0.95%.
I used Pensionbee to mop up some very old pensions from when I first started work 20 years ago (it really is a good service to track lost pensions and they do all the searching for you so long as you know the company name) so have 16.5k in there at the moment.
Happily, freetrades new sipp (ignoring the far better way of investing individually yourself - for me at least) becomes cheaper than 0.5% as soon as you hold more than £16,500 with pensionbee if you’re already a freetrade plus member.
I’ll be transferring to Freetrade as soon as i can!
Edit: also just checked and don’t think there’s any fee to transfer the pension out. I’d honestly recommend Pensionbee to anyone to combine your small pensions elsewhere and find lost ones… Then transfer to Freetrade.
It would essentially be the same value cap as the SIPP based on the % platform fees brokers offer which are all about the same but I’ll add it in as SIPPs have extra costs with most other brokers except Vanguard.
Yeah. I think what I plan to do is have a simpler table like the one above, purely basic cost thresholds (in some cases the fees don’t matter so much because Freetrade is cheaper quite quickly. And then do a second sheet with more detail for each. Fx, drawdown fees like you say as they’re often forgotten. I was considering that the best option might be to do some scenarios e.g. Bob invests monthly into x,y,z as that might give a more interesting comparison than just meaningless numbers.
"Over 30 years, for an initial pot of £20,000 and assuming 5 per cent growth per year, Freetrade claims its Sipp could save Hargreaves Lansdown customers up to £9,900, AJ Bell customers up to £6,100 and Interactive Investors up to £7,400.
The graphic above assumes a portfolio in equal amounts of shares, ETFs and trusts and two share deals per month - amounting to 24 a year.
Hargreaves Lansdown caps annual charges on shares in a Sipp at £200 while AJ Bell caps this annual charge at £25 a quarter (£100 a year). "
Hi Eden, this table shows ISA fees. It includes almost every provider out there. Happy to work with you to add other parameters. Here’s a link to the full table.
Honestly this sounds like someone who’s just complaining that they ignored what they were buying, ignored the terms, ignored the settings of their account and ignored the statements they were getting that will have shown those fees for years, and just so happens to have a platform to go on and complain about to make it look less like his fault.
He wasn’t hit by a 15% fee, im not a fan of some of the costs at HL but that’s just a straight up lie.
Its also not really hidden, though maybe the customer service agent wasn’t very clear.
as all of the vanguard funds are free in Freetrade (no counting the fund fee) so a passive investor who doesn’t want an ISA may be better riff with Freetrade from the get go, plus they’re still not locked into vanguard funds.
