The Lemon Fool

I've just been annoyed by Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell with their LISA accounts. Both say that if you invest a lump sum, the government bonus will turn up some random time later (4-9 weeks), but they won't notify you that it has, nor invest it with the same preferences. So after you invest £4k in April, you can't just forget about it for a year, you need to manually poll your account in June, July and August, and place a new trade when it arrives.

They do have automatic bonus investment for regular savings, but don't understand how that annoys Rich Uncle John who wants to help his nieces once a year.

HL say "For the 2017/18 tax year, we’ll claim your bonus for you in April 2018 and you’ll see it in your account by 4 May 2018", perhaps AJB are the same

Well, the basic mechanics don’t sound very different from the tax reclaim in a SIPP- that arrives in the account some random time after your contribution, and you have to invest it separately. You only have to wait 4-6 weeks though, not 13 months, which really seems ridiculous. Why can’t they add the uplift for each contribution as it arrives, as per SIPPs?

Jabd2001 wrote:Well, the basic mechanics don’t sound very different from the tax reclaim in a SIPP- that arrives in the account some random time after your contribution, and you have to invest it separately. You only have to wait 4-6 weeks though, not 13 months, which really seems ridiculous. Why can’t they add the uplift for each contribution as it arrives, as per SIPPs?

Snot random. Your contribution is noted to HMRC on the 5th of the month, to include all contributions since the last 5th of the month. HMRC refund turns up 21st of the month following. So you can time contribs to minimise the gap.

Ok thanks for that. I think I knew there was a pattern to the pension tax reclaim.

Re LISA, I’ve been doing a bit of digging around around, and found a couple of sources (MSE and Monevator) that say that the bonus for 17/18 will be credited in April/May 18, and thereafter will be credited on a monthly basis (or I assume whenever contributions made if less frequent than monthly). Probably will be similar mechanism (and timing?) to the pension tax reclaim.

So, just a teething problem for this year.

See my previous response!

In case anyone else is, ahem, not in the habit of reading their "Secure Messages" in a timely manner, it turns out that H-L were planning to offer automatic reinvestment of government bonuses, but this turned out to be to complicated to implement. So now we'll be logging in once a month to invest the £83.25. This is not as hands-off as I'd hoped, may transfer to Nutmeg once they get their act together and start accepting LISA
transfers.