Q & A Session with the CEO

Transferring your Cash ISA to Healthy Investment is really easy. You just need to complete a simple form and send it back to us. We do everything else.    

HMRC has lots of rules in place to make sure that ISA transfers are completed promptly so you shouldn’t have to wait to long for the ISA to be transferred to us.

If you are confident about making the investment decision for yourself rather than paying for financial advice then you should be looking for a low to medium risk investment that includes some form of capital guarantee.

You should maximise your ISA allowance as any growth from an ISA is free of income and capital gains tax.

The safest form of investment is obviously a bank or building society deposit account but with interest rates being so low it’s likely that any growth won’t keep up with inflation and you’ll see the cost of living rise faster than your savings. The advantage is that your capital is not at risk and you would be able to access your cash whenever you want to, but after 12 years you’d be able to buy less than you could with the money now.

Whilst there is a lot to consider when making an investment and if you’re in doubt you should pay for independent financial advice, you could consider a Healthy Investment ISA and Bond.  They both invest in a cautiously managed With-profits Fund and include a 10 year capital and growth and guarantee where an investor is guaranteed to get back their initial investment and all of the bonuses that have been added.

The aim of smoothing is to smooth out some of the highs and lows of stock market volatility. This is really important for a lot of investors as it means they don’t have to guess exactly what’s the best day to make an investment based on how the stock market has moved the previous day.

Smoothing helps to give investors a more consistent return on their investment.

As the stock market moves up and down each day and we are able to smooth out the ups and downs the return you receive will be consistent. Some days it will be a little bit more and some days it will be a little bit less that you might have received in a unit linked fund with the same underlying investments.

Smoothing will not protect an investor from sustained long term falls in the value of investments which means that for a Healthy Investment investor they might have to wait until their next capital and growth guarantee anniversary in order to get all of their initial investment back.

Bonuses are calculated based on the investment return our With-profits Fund has generated over the last year whereas interest rates are generally fixed by a bank or building society based on the Bank of England’s interest rate.

On our bonds and ISAs it’s quite easy to compare a reversionary bonus rate to an interest rate as they are applied in the same way and each year you will get a bonus on the bonuses that have already been added to your policy, as with compound interest on a bank account.

It’s more difficult on regular savings plans to compare the bonus rate with an interest rate as the bonus is added to your guaranteed sum assured that we agreed with you when you started the savings plan.

I’m not sure I would agree with that. Traditionally With-profits investments were seen as a ‘working class’ way of investing in the stock market without having to engage with stock brokers or investment managers that were seen as being out of reach of the average working man.

The aims of our Investment Bond,ISA and regular savings plans are fairly straight forward and as they include capital and growth guarantees are popular with investors looking for a simple lower risk investment.

Whilst there are some aspects of With-profits that are very complicated, especially some of the actuarial calculations that have to be done to ensure members receive a fair return and the Society remains financially strong, these are done by us and our experts so as an investor you don’t have to worry about them.

Investing in a With-profits Fund means that you don’t have to make individual investment decisions on which asset class and which individual share is likely to perform best based on how much risk you are willing to take.