Good question. I would assume 0.22% is all you pay. Simply because otherwise the fee would be comparable to actively managed products, which this fund is not.
0.22 is the OCF, so thatās the total fee you pay. I think I remember reading that you could replicate it yourself and save a tiny amount, but for me itās not worth the hassle. I canāt look it up now, but you could tot up each of the fees on each etf to compare.
I think Freetrade have said that they wonāt add funds, in the current plans at least. I think I asked before, you have to do some admin and relationship with the fund manager, I believe, so not as straightforward as adding securities.
Ok, so I worked it out for LifeStrategy 80% as thatās what I own. The average OCF if you replicated it yourself would come to 0.12%, vs the LifeStrategy charge of 0.22%.
It may sound a fair bit, but ultimately, the saving would be a mere Ā£1 on an investment of Ā£1000 (i.e Ā£1.20 vs Ā£2.20), or Ā£10 on Ā£10,000. Now I know the power of compounding, but to me Iām not sure manually investing in 14 funds, and then re-balancing every so often would make up for the hassle.
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Anyone want to run the maths on a full ISA investment of Ā£20000 over a 10, 20 & 30 year period?
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Nice work! I guess the next question is what is the cost of your time to manually rebalance these and how often?
We still donāt know how quickly they publish changes!
Alright @anon810895, I calculate that over a 30 year period, assuming annual returns of 8%, you would save Ā£2,466.92 by manually replicating the Vanguard Lifestrategy 80% fund.
I just calculated the difference in cost for a maxāed out ISA, which is Ā£20 on a Ā£20k annual contribution (Ā£20,000 * (0.22% - 0.12%). Then compound this money that youāve saved at a rate of 8% annually, adding the saving amount every year:
Edit: Your actual ISA would return exactly 1000 x that, obviously: Ā£2,466,917.36
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@AchillesFirstStand @CrockettAndTubbs I think they publish details every quarter (hereās the latest newsletter).
As for the personal cost to that, it depends on your salary and how much you have invested. But, letās say it takes you an hour each quarter to check your investments, find the new proportions, and make 14 trades - then even if you have 20k in your ISA, youāre only saving Ā£20 a year, or an hours work for a fiver.
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Yep, and thereās no API for Vanguard. You could in theory automate the re-balancing otherwise, and do it more frequently as well.
Edit: Iāve found an old interview from John Ameriks (the head of Vanguardās Investment Counseling and Research Group), who says that the funds rebalance daily!: Interview with Vanguardās John Ameriks about Target Retirement Funds ā Oblivious Investor
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I thought they might not publish the changes, that its their secret sauce. Didnāt sound right since it is a passive fund tracking other passive funds.But daily re-balances donāt sound so passive 
Distributions were updated for Lifestrategy 100% with the data on 31/01/2020:
Not much changes since December.
KID document mentions this is an actively managed fund, so the distributions are not calculated based on current performance of the funds, like I assumed at start (which means this fund is trying to time the market).
I am really interested if the percentage allocated to US funds will start to go down throughout this year, at the moment the allocation is the almost the same as in December 2019.
Corrrection, US equity Index fund actually increased from 19.1% to 19.4%
Are the allocations not set, i.e. it will always hold ~20% in US equities?
Good question. I dont think so, but I donāt have anything to prove otherwise.
But still, current exposure to US is bigger than 20%. There are two 100% US funds on the list + 68% of Developed world is US as well.
So I would say a bit less than 40% of current Lifestrategy 100 is in US stocks.
LifeStrategy in ETF form
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Same name but from the article it sounds like there wonāt be home bias, which would differ from a characteristic of existing Lifestrategy funds
Such a shame as Iād love to move my ISA over to Freetrade. But until Freetrade offer the Lifestrategy-80% Acc mutual fund, I wonāt be switching my ISA over unfortunately. Iād suggest that if Freetrade only made available the āTop 10ā mutual funds, this would be in it!
The only think that might make me alternatively consider switching - is if Vanguardās ETF version of the LifeStrategy-80% fund - see https://www.etfstrategy.com/vanguard-unveils-multi-asset-lifestrategy-ucits-etfs-on-xetra-and-borsa-italiana-48938/ became UK focused (as its totally different to the UK focused mutual fun), and if it also became GBP currency based (as I donāt want to use a Euro denominated fund and assume the currency risk, when Iāll be taking the money out in GBP).
Such a shame, as Iād love to move my ISA to freetrade.
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In the absence of this mutual fund being available, Iāve decided to re-evaluate.
Some might be interested to know that Iāve just decided to move my Ā£100k ISA from Fidelity to Freetrade. (Freetrade platform costs are minimal for the platform charge at Ā£3 a month.)
And Iām investing into this fund in my Freetrade ISA instead - https://fund-docs.vanguard.com/ie00bng8l278-en.pdf - which is available in Freetradeās ISA, and has only a 0.24% TER, so is great value in my opinion, whilst also being Global, and an ESG fund.
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