I get a little frustrated by an obsessive focus on ‘use cases’, and the corollary of that that Freetrade (or anyone else) will judge how worthy a particular use case is. What if your users were just to tell you that they understand what a flexible ISA is and that having a flexible ISA is important to them? You don’t need to know how they will take advantage of that flexibility, and in any case that may evolve over time.
That said, I want the Freetrade ISA to be a flexible ISA so that I can move current-year subscriptions in and out of it, and in and out of a cash ISA, without having to commit to the final allocation of current-year subscriptions between my Freetrade ISA and my cash ISA until 5 April. By not offering a flexible ISA, you are forcing people to get that allocation of current-year subscriptions right first time (and no doubt therefore often to delay making it until near the end of the tax year: https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/ideas/2021/07/29/flexible-isas-might-encourage-long-termism/). You may say that not having such a capability isn’t the end of world, and you’d be right (though not having Freetrade at all wouldn’t be the end of the world) - but it’s also a massive irritation, and leads to negative sentiment about the platform, particularly when the issue has sat unaddressed for over 3 years.
As a more general question, how much development time do you allocate to these ‘quality of life’ features? Having an ISA that is flexible is a textbook quality of life feature. It’s not a huge headline feature that you can market the **** out of, but it would make your product much more pleasant to use over an extended period of time.
Lack of flexibility is a deterrent that makes people anxious to not invest more. I.e they keep more cash outside of Free trade in a flexible cash ISA just in case they need the money, and they know they loose tax benefits on anything they take out of freetrade. Or even outside of any ISA.
Whilst it sounds like a feature which will generate portfolio churn, it is likely to actually increase the average assets under management and reduce transfers in/out. It is because people can self service their needs, and top things back up, and effectively perform transfers within a year by themselves.
I know this is an old thread and this issue has been “being looked at” for 3 years + but I wanted to show my support for the feature. I think it would actually make the app more usable for the more users. Being able to drip feed from a flexible cash ISA or redivert funds after possible change in risk levels of users would make the whole process easier and more comfortable, not to mention more profitable. Thanks in advance.
Would love to see this too if possible. What are the rules around flexible ISAs normally? Could you in theory take out > 20k then put it back in at a later date, or is it more you can play within your 20k limit for a year?
My use case is that normally I wouldn’t want to withdraw money from ISA account, but if something unexpected happens, it’s important that I could withdraw the money and later put it back to ISA.
It’s a feature that I hope I won’t need to use, but the feature has to be there. It’s a little like FSCS, I hope I would never need to rely on FSCS to recover money, but it’s important that my account is covered by FSCS should it be needed one day.
I didn’t expect flexible ISA to be difficult to implement, I think it more or less boils down to adding a column in the database to keep track of withdrawn amount in the current tax year.
I hope the feature would be available soon so I could transfer my ISA to Freetrade.
I really like FreeTrade but the lack of flexibility means I’m wasting opportunities by having to keep more emergency cash outside the ISA than I would like to.
Regardless of whether the ISA was flexible or not you would still need to wait for share settle times, withdrawal times, by having a flexible ISA won’t mean the money is back in your bank any quicker?
It would be a nice feature to have but I wonder if it’s the case of it just not being worth the engineering time to do when there’s many other higher priorities
Obviously do what you prefer, but generally an investment account is not the place for emergency funds
