I’m going to publish this article now (13\/1\/2024), so that anyone reading it has time to act, and I’ll update the following sections as I go through the actual transfer process.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn-specie Transfer<\/h3>\n\n\n\n All the platforms I looked at offer in-specie transfers. In short, this means your holdings are simply transferred, as is, from one provider to another. So your investments are never sold, you aren’t out of the market for any time etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The only thing to watch out for with this is you don’t want to be doing trades in your existing account during the transfer window, as that may complicate things. So if you are investing monthly, you will want to suspend this until the transfer is complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Process Overview<\/h3>\n\n\n\n I had problems with initiating the process online so ended up having to phone Hargreaves Lansdown (if you’re a complete Luddite, you can also do it by filling in a form and posting it to them).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turns out via a thread on the FIREUK Reddit sub that several other people had exactly the same issue with the online process (so it seems that HL have a technical problem they don’t know about)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Step 1<\/strong> – was to register and get a client ID, which I did via the ISA transfer team. You need to have a client ID before you can start the transfer process. You will need your National Insurance number to hand for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStep 2<\/strong> – was to initiate the transfer of both the ISA & the SIPP from Hargreaves Lansdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor the ISA, this can all be done over the phone by calling the ISA Transfer team (Tel. 0117 906 7816).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rather annoyingly, you can’t do the SIPP transfer by phone. You need to call the Pension helpdesk team (Tel. 0117 980 9926) and they will email you a form, which you then need to fill out and send by post (how antediluvian is that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I haven’t had to speak to Interactive Investor at all during the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Time To Do the Application<\/h3>\n\n\n\n The call to the ISA transfer team took around 15 minutes, to do both my and MAFFs ISAs. I had our Interactive Investor account details to hand, so everything was straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The call to the Pensions helpdesk took around 5 mins and I had the form in my inbox within another 5 mins. The SIPP transfer forms didn’t take long to fill out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Transfer Time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n Hargreaves Lansdown told me it would take between 2-6 weeks to transfer the ISAs and 4-6 weeks to transfer the SIPPs and that this timescale is largely dependent on the other provider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Transfer Time Summary<\/h4>\n\n\n\n MAFFs ISA<\/strong> transfer – 7 working daysMAFFs SIPP<\/strong> transfer – 53 working days (8 weeks)My ISA<\/strong> transfer – 11 working daysMy SIPP<\/strong> transfer – 53 working days (8 weeks)<\/p>\n\n\n\nI have set out the timetable of how long everything took and the different steps below:<\/p>\n\n\n\nDate<\/th> Stage<\/th> No. of Working Days<\/th><\/tr><\/thead> Friday 19\/01\/24<\/td> Initiated ISA transfer over the phone and sent off the SIPP transfer forms in the post.<\/td> 0<\/td><\/tr> Saturday 20\/01\/24<\/td> 3 emails were received, within a few minutes of each other, from Interactive Investor, telling me that they had received MAFF’s ISA transfer request. The email tells me the transfer is estimated to take place on the 29th Feb. <\/td><\/tr> Tuesday 23\/01\/24<\/td> Letters containing our PIN numbers arrived via post, so I can create an online account and log in to see an empty ISA (as the transfer has not happened yet)<\/td> 2<\/td><\/tr> Thursday 25\/01\/24<\/td> 3 emails were received, within a few minutes of each other, from Interactive Investor, telling me that they have received MAFF’s ISA transfer request. The email tells me the transfer is estimated to take place on the 29th Feb. 4<\/td><\/tr> Friday 26\/01\/24<\/td> Letter received in the post from Hargreaves Lansdown telling me they are going to contact my current provider to start the ISA transfer. 5<\/td><\/tr> Saturday MAFF received the same letter from HL as I did above telling her the ISA transfer is in progress.<\/td> 5<\/td><\/tr> Monday I received a secure message in the HL app apologising for the mistake re Interactive Broker and to say that they have now corrected it.<\/td> 6<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday MAFF received an email from Interactive Investor telling her that the ISA transfer was now complete. 7<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday 3 emails were received from Interactive Investor confirming my ISA transfer is now in progress. So it looks like I’m about 1 week behind MAFF due to the Hargreaves Lansdown error, which is not a major issue for me.<\/td> 7<\/td><\/tr> Friday Letter arrived from HL confirming they have received my SIPP transfer request.<\/td> 10<\/td><\/tr> Monday MAFF had the same letter as above from HL, confirming they have received her SIPP transfer request. 11<\/td><\/tr> Wednesday Secure email from HL confirming they had corrected an error I had reported to them re 2 funds they have set up as the USD version rather than the GBP version (see ‘Experience End-to-End’ section below for more details)<\/td> 13<\/td><\/tr> Wednesday Secure message from HL was sent to MAFF regarding her SIPP transfer. HL are sending her a ‘discharge form’ in the post which she needs to complete and send by post to Interactive Investor. 18<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday Having sent MAFFs discharge form off in the post to Interactive Investor yesterday, I realised it has been some time since I heard anything about my pension transfer. 22<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday Having heard zilch from anyone about the discharge forms for my pension, I gave HL a call to be told they’ve sent them out in the post to me today. So we’ll wait and see if they arrive.<\/td> 27<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday My pension discharge form finally arrived, so filled it in and sent it off in the post to Interactive Investor.<\/td> 32<\/td><\/tr> Thursday MAFF had an email from Hargreaves confirming they’d received the pension valuation from II and are now waiting for the assets to be transferred across. So that’s about 13 working days since she sent her discharge form off.<\/td> 34<\/td><\/tr> Thursday Both MAFF & I received an email from Hargreaves telling us our pensions are due to transfer over on the 21st March.<\/td> 39<\/td><\/tr> Wednesday Logged in to check HL, as tomorrow is the date our pensions should have transferred, and it’s happened a day early. Our pension investments are now with HL and I’m just waiting for the small amount of cash to come across as well. 44<\/td><\/tr> Tuesday Email from Interactive Investor to tell me they have transferred the SIPP cash balances to Hargreaves for both MAFF & I. Confirmed the cash is showing in both HL accounts. 53<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Experience End-to-EndWould I Transfer Investments Accounts Again? Read more >Transferring Investment Accounts – And Getting Paid For It<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":98,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1420,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions\/1420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aimingforfire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}