We deduct your service fee around the 1st of every month. This is calculated based on the total value of your investments held over the previous month.
If you hold any other accounts outside of your joint account, we do not include them when we are adding up your investments to work out what service fee you pay. The service fee payable on a joint account is calculated on that account only.
The total value is divided by 12 to determine the monthly amount that’s taken from your joint accounts.
When you pay service fees, they are always taken from your Cash Management Account.
- If you have cash in there, we will take your fees from this cash. This helps protect any tax-wrapped ISA and SIPP investments you may have, as it allows you to pay these fees from separate cash.
- If you don't have enough cash in there, we will sell from your investments to make up the outstanding balance and transfer that to the Cash Management Account. When we do this, we have a hierarchy and start by selling from your largest investment by value and by asset class. This means for example we would take the fee from the largest fund before we take it from an exchange-traded fund or investment trust.
In most cases, this won’t make any difference to what you pay, as taking 0.35% from two accounts separately is the same as taking 0.35% from the accounts added together.
However, if you hold £15,000 in an individual account (such as an ISA) and £15,000 in a joint account then you’d pay the 0.35% service fee on the individual account (as the total value of investments is over £25,000 [£15,000+£15,000=£30,000]) plus the £90 (£7.50 a month) a year fee on the joint account (as it’s below £25,000) - unless the joint account has a monthly regular savings plan of at least £25.