anyone care to look at these, currently at the post office and yorkshire building society which gives rpi + 1.5% As I see it the post office one starts in may with your capital sat in a holding account earning a relatively good 2.5% but with a start in may it could be that the starting rpi will be relatively high?.... And the gains locked in year on year?.... The 1.5% being not compounded just sat the at year 1 for 4 more years. I am ignoring the investment at birmingham mid shires which gives a party 0.25% on top of rpi. Any more negatives.... As well of course that even national savings old product only lasted 3 years...and 5 years is an awfully long time in finance circles.
At least the PO offering seems to give 1.5% over the RPI every year. From how I read the Yorkshire offering, which quotes an APR of just 0.29%, it seems what you get back from that at the end is the whole of the RPI uplift plus just one lot of 1.5%.
Do you mean that May is traditionally a time of high RPI every year? If so, this should not matter as it will be measured again every May.
"Locked in" doesn't rally describe well what happens. The feature is that the RPI rise is measured every year, and if negative is ignored. Then 1.5% is added. The corresponding results for each of 5 years are added together and that represents your flat interest for the whole period.
Indeed. 1.5% is the flat annual rate, i.e. if inflation were zero for whole time, then your return would be 7.5% for 5 years, which corresponds to an AER of 1.46%.
The inflation component is not compounded either. If inflation were 4.5% in each of the 5 years, you would get 6% each year, a total of 30%, which corresponds to an AER of 5.39%.
The wording in the YBS product is misleading. The 1.5% quoted is not an annual rate, it is the 5 year rate, corresponding, as they say, to an AER of 0.29%. But on the other hand the inflation component *is* compounded, because it is calculated by reference to the period start and end values of the inflation *index*. In other words, if inflation were 4.5% in each of the 5 years, the index would go up not by 22.5% but by 24.6%, and that's what you'd get (plus the 1.5%, making 26.1% altogether, or 4.75% AER).
So whilst in broad terms the PO are paying inflation+1.5%, YBS are paying inflation+0.3%, which is almost as "party" as you say BMS are.
IIRC the last set of NS+I index-linked bonds (when you could buy them,) gave RPI + 1% pa compound for the 5 year bond and were not subject to income tax. You could also terminate early without too much damage.
The penalty for terminating early in the Post Office (bank of Ireland) offering is not defined and it "will be calculated and advised to you at the time your request is made and will be deducted from your capital, meaning you could get back less than you invested." that's a bit worrying.
I suppose that is so, although I wonder if some bonds manage to return part of the growth as a capital gain rather than income? But I was really comparing against the NSI index-linked bonds. Presumbaly these new products have sprung up to fill the gap left by the former NSI offerings.
The flyer that the YBS sent me says RPI plus 0.1% (plus an additional 0.5% - over the whole term, if you invest by, um today!).
Having read the leaflet I want to know what the following means:
"Your money is protected in the same way as any other bank or BS account you have. Should YBS default, there is no protection provided by Credit Suisse (described earlier as the "Account manager") or any other third party and you could lose some or all of your investment."
Surely the Bank deposit protection scheme is a "third party", don't they protect the investment?
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