Our members are enjoying the benefits of yet another successful year of solid growth. Over the last financial year, we’ve seen our total assets increase by 12.6 percent to £158 million, with you, our members, investing a total of £14.4 million over the year.
We’ve just announced our latest round of bonuses on all our With-profits products and all our members with these investments will be receiving their bonus statements over the next few days. This will show exactly how much has been added to the value of their investment.
Bonus rates increase
Bonuses on all our Investment Bonds and ISAs have increased from last year. This reflects the strong performance of the Society’s Ethical With-profits Fund.
Reversionary or regular bonus rates are calculated based on investment performance, but we also take into account the costs of running your policy and the society and the amount of money the regulator requires us to keep to ensure we can keep all the guarantees we have made to investors.
The Board’s main priorities are to make sure the bonuses are both fair and competitive.
A year of growth
Our chief executive Peter Green explains why he thinks the last 12 months have been so successful.
“Our members have always been attracted by our commitment to investing in companies that don’t cause harm, and of course I’m really proud of our history in that respect. This year we’ve seen some very encouraging results from our Ethical With-profits Fund – it’s a nicely balanced mix of stocks and shares, fixed interest bonds, commercial property and cash deposits – and so I’m delighted that we’ve been able to announce these recent bonuses for all of our With-profits products as a result of that great performance. Over £1.9 million is being added to members investments”.
Behind the numbers
So, what do these bonus rates mean? Well, the first thing to remember is that the bonus rate declared is the net rate you’ll receive after any charges have been taken off, and also that the amount reflects the capital and bonus guarantees on all of our With-profits ISAs and series 3, 4, 5 and 6 Investment Bonds. It’s also worth bearing in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future bonuses – the rates can, and do, change every year. Finally, these bonuses are what we call ‘reversionary’ – that means they’re declared every year.
You can find full details of the bonus rate for each of our directly available products here:
If you’ve got any more questions about how we calculate them or how our products have performed in the past, just give us a call and we’ll be happy to talk it through with you.
