Plan & Invest

We do ask people to be willing to invest for a minimum of five years as investing is all about playing the long game and giving your money time to grow.

However, you can withdraw your money at any time if you need to but you should always consider the implications of making a withdrawal either from an ISA or an Investment Account.

Any gains on investments within and ISA are tax-free so to try and retain the tax benefit of your Plan & Invest ISA, we would sell investments from your Investment Account first. If you want to withdraw more than is in your Investment Account, we would then sell investments in your ISA.

The Plan & Invest ISA is flexible which means that you can withdraw money and pay it back in during the same tax year without using any additional allowance.

There are no penalties for withdrawing your money. However, there may be Capital Gains Tax to pay when investments from an Investment Account are sold. Also, if you make a full withdrawal from an account, we will sell your investments and transfer the cash to your nominated bank account after deducting 0.2% of the value of the account. We retain this 0.2% to cover any outstanding service costs that may be due. In most cases, these costs will be accounted for within 60 days and then we’ll return any remaining amount.

Always bear in mind that tax rules might change in the future and their effect on you will depend on your individual circumstances.

There are a couple of scenarios where we’ll use a glide path in your investment strategy.

A glide path is a pre-defined formula that changes your asset allocation (the mix of investment types you hold) over time.

If you have a target date for your investing goal, we’ll decrease your exposure to riskier investment types such as equities as that target date approaches. At the same time, we’ll invest in more stable investments such as bonds so that the returns you’ve already made are safeguarded, to an extent, from market fluctuations.

We’ll also use a glidepath at the start of your investing journey if you’re new to investing and/or we think investing might make you nervous (known as low risk composure technically). When we do this, we’ll start you off at a lower level of risk in the early years and then gradually adjust your asset allocation to include a greater proportion of riskier investments.

We only ever use glidepaths that are in line with your objectives and what we believe is right for you overall.

If your goal is just to invest, we’ll simply manage your investments based on the level of risk we believe is right for you.