Tag: sipp

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Investment

Are SIPPs now better than ISAs?

The proposed changes to UK pension rules announced in the March 2014 Budget will make Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs) far more flexible. From April 2015, investors should be able to withdraw as much of their SIPP fund as they want immediately on retirement.

Since the choice between a SIPP and an Individual Savings Account (ISA) is a trade off between flexibility and tax relief, many investors will feel that this tips the balance in favour of SIPPs. But while the changes are welcome, I think it makes less difference than you’d expect.

Unlike some finance writers that I generally agree with (this piece on Monevator, for example), I think that the practical advantages of SIPPs over ISAs are easy to overstate. To see why, let’s look at how much the added tax relief from a SIPP is really worth for the average investor.

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Categories
Updates

Updates on Saxo Modern Wealth Management

Since the Saxo Modern Wealth Management platform for UK long-term investors is rather different to the Saxo Bank platform, it now has its own entry in the broker directory. There are also a few updates to the details of the service from the summary when it first launched in April 2012.

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News

Saxo Modern Wealth Management

[Update 06/10/12: Modern Wealth Management FX charge is confirmed to be 0.5%, in line with the regular Saxo account, not 1.5% (and is being waived until mid 2013) – not clear if this was an error in the original charges sheet or has subsequently been changed. See this update for other additional details of the service. There is also now a separate entry for Modern Wealth Management in the broker directory.]

Saxo Bank has expanded its services for UK investors with a new offering branded as Modern Wealth Management. As the name of the basic account – Saxo Invest – implies, this is aimed more at medium-to-long-term investors than Saxo’s traditional client base of traders.

On first glance, it’s a useful product, with a simpler front-end compared to the Saxo Trader platform and better options for tax-efficient investing. Unfortunately, there seems to be rather a large catch within the small print of the charges.

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