Junior Isa

A question about : Junior Isa

I have recently opened up a Halifax junior ftse tracker ISA for my youngest child.

I have just been told by Halifax that on top of the annual fee of 0.5% they are going to introduce a monthly fee. There is no apparent benefit to me. They are just going to take more money from the investment.

So I'm going to move the investment. I like the product and am interested in how I go about comparing the fees for this kind of product.

Any advice from the experts here would be amazing.

Best answers:

• The fee for the tracker at 0.5% is way too high compared to the others on the market, also the monthly fee is probably not competitive to other fund platforms you could be using.
  Google compare fund platforms and also have a look at other possible trackers/funds instead of the one you are using.
  I recently helped someone open a junior isa for their newborn and recommended vanguard lifestrategy 100% for them.
• https://www.youinvest.co.uk/investin...ren/junior-isa
  might be worth a look?
• I use youinvest for some of my investments (the investment platform, although not specifically the JISA product). They are fine.
  Another one would be Charles Stanley Direct https://www.charles-stanley-direct.c..._Accounts/JISA but there are loads more. If you are dripping new cash into the fund over time, Youinvest would charge for each new purchase of fund units but if you're not doing that, the benefit of Youinvest over Charles Stanley is that the ongoing service fee is currently about 0.05% cheaper.
  The difference with these 'platforms' is that they are fund supermarkets where you pay a fee to the platform (e.g. 0.2% or 0.25% with the two examples given) and then you pay a fee to the fund manager for the specific fund you hold, which could be 0.1% for the cheapest funds to 1% or more for the most expensive. Seems it would make sense to switch if Halifax want to bring in more charges.
  With platforms you can get a much wider choice of investments than Halifax and if just looking for a basic tracker you could end up with a total cost of platform + fund for under 0.4%, instead of Halifax's charge of 0.5% (plus new halifax monthly fee).
  InvestInPoker is right that once you are looking at all the thousands of options available on a fund platform it probably makes sense to look for a fund that is broader than a single country tracker, i.e. one that is not just invested in the largest UK companies like what you have at the moment. The funds which hold wider and more diversified sets of investments including international companies too, can cost more than the most basic of single-country trackers. But as you will be saving money on the annual percentage fee overall, you can afford to do something more advanced than the absolute barebones cheapest fund and still come in at or 0.5% or thereabouts.