Investing

Your money is invested into mainly passive investment funds, such as Exchange Traded Funds [ETFs] and Mutual funds 

A fund is a bundle of lots of individual assets, like stocks, bond or property, which you buy all in one go – this makes buying funds a cost-effective way to invest and diversify your portfolio.

Our experts have pre-selected a range of passive investment funds, which we use to build your Wealthify Personal Investment Plan. The mix of funds in your plan will depend on your attitude to risk – if you have a low risk appetite, your Plan will contain a higher percentage of low-risk funds. Higher-risk Plans will include more high-risk investments. Since financial markets are always changing, we might make small periodic changes to the mix of funds in your plan to make sure it still matches your risk profile and goals.

Why invest in one company, when you can invest in them all? That’s the essence of passive investing. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket and relying on one particular company to perform well, you spread your money across all of them, so that you benefit from their collective strength. To do this, you need funds like ETFs and Mutual Funds (known as passive investment vehicles). These let your money track an index like the FTSE 100, which is composed of the 100 largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange – companies like Royal Dutch Shell, BT Group and Unilever.

Passive investing is generally accepted as a more effective long-term strategy than the alternative, active investing, where fund managers try to pick the stocks they think will do best. The Dow S&P Indices show that as few as 14% of active fund managers actually manage to beat the market each year, when looked at over a long time period.

Your plan will consist of a mix of assets, such as shares, government bonds, corporate bonds, cash, property, private equity, commodities and hedge funds. You can find out more about all of these in the Glossary. The exact combination will depend on the preferences you give us when you apply, and will change over time.

Yes, you will always own the underlying funds in your Wealthify Plan. There is no master fund into which your money is invested, as you’ll find with some services. This is an advantage for you, as it means you can see exactly what we are buying and selling for your Plan. We list the assets you own in the Plan detail screen, found in your dashboard and we send you a transaction receipt for every purchase and sale – so you always know where your money is.

No, that’s what we’re here for. You only need to tell us your investment style and how much you want to invest, and we do everything else. Our investment team have pre-selected a range of passive funds, and programmed our automated investment system with algorithms (mathematical formulas) that build your Plan based on what you tell us your goals are.

Cash is a type of investment (or asset) itself. It’s a low risk asset, so the return on cash is typically low, but it’s a good way to help protect investors from losses if there’s an indication that markets might lose value. The amount of cash and cash equivalent assets in your plan will depend on the level of risk you choose and will be adjusted periodically in response to market movements.

When you build your Wealthify Personal Investment Plan, we give you a calculation of what it could be worth at the end of your investment timeline. The calculation uses past benchmark data (see explanation below) to predict future performance, so you should only take it as a guide, not a guarantee. With investing, there are no guaranteed returns and you should remember that the exact value of your plan could be more or less than you expect.

We publish our benchmarks in the valuations we send to all customers, to give you something to compare the performance of your plan against. 

We use ARC Private Client Indices as the benchmarks for the majority of our Plans, rather than an index such as the FTSE 100, because we feel it more closely matches the type of diversified investment plans that Wealthify offers. The ARC Private Client Indices are a peer group benchmark which show how other companies’ investment styles have performed. The Indices are based on real performance numbers from hundreds of other Plans.  Learn more about ARC Indices.

For our Cautious Plan, we use the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is the UK’s main measure of inflation, or the speed at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise and fall.

It’s important to remember that benchmarks and predictions are never perfect and past performance is not an indicator of future growth.

Here are the benchmarks we use for each of our five Investment Styles

With investing your capital is at risk and you could get back less than you put in. As an investor, it’s important to understand that stock markets have good periods and bad periods and that you shouldn’t panic at first sight of a bad period. You should think of investing as a long-term prospect, and remember that markets will generally see growth over the long-term.

Yes, if you are a UK resident (England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland) you can use all, or part of your annual tax-efficient savings allowance of £20,000 (current tax year) to invest in a Stocks and Shares ISA with Wealthify. We don’t offer cash ISAs, Innovative Finance ISAs or Lifetime ISAs. Take a look at our ISA page for more information.

Yes, you can build as many Plans as you like. Some people prefer to keep their money all in one pot, others will prefer to split it into separate savings pots - Wealthify lets you do either. You can even choose different investment styles for each Plan. Whatever you decide, you can rest assured that there’s no additional charge for creating more than one Plan, you’ll only pay our simple management fee of 0.7%-0.4% per annum, depending on the total value of your investments, plus an average underlying fund charge of 0.19% per year.

Your investments will be held with our custodian bank, Winterflood Securities, a global financial services provider and part of Close Brothers Group, who have been trading for more than 130 years. Winterflood Securities hold your assets separately (ring-fenced) from Wealthify, so even if we went into administration, our creditors would not have a claim to your investments. The first £50,000 of your investments may also be covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, however, it’s important to understand that the FSCS doesn't cover you in the event that your investments do not perform as expected and you get back less than you originally invested. For more information visit https://www.fscs.org.uk/

No, we won’t tell you when we adjust your Plan. We build and manage your plan for you on a discretionary basis and depending on what the markets do, we could be adjusting your Plan regularly, so it wouldn’t be practical to let you know. You can, however track your investments via your dashboard at any time to see exactly what investments you are holding and how your Plan is performing. 

There is currently no facility for this, but there may be in future. You can access and withdraw your money 24/7, although it’s worth remembering that making regular withdrawals will affect how quickly you reach the investment goals you set when you created your plan.

We typically invest your money within two working days of receiving it. However, it may take a couple of extra days for the investments to show on your dashboard, due to the investing process.

We’re not a fully-automated investment service. We automate certain parts of the investment process, like monitoring how well global markets are performing, using computers programmed with algorithms (mathematical formulas). This is more cost-effective than having highly-paid fund managers do it and we pass those savings onto you. Our experts use the market information along with their own their knowledge and experience, to make small adjustments to the mix of funds in your investment plan, where appropriate. So Wealthify uses a mix of smart algorithms and human expertise to make sure your plan stays on track.

Your returns are shown at the top of your dashboard as a percentage and actual monetary value, so you always know exactly how your investments are performing.

We calculate your returns using the ‘Time-Weighted Rate of Return’ (TWRR) method, which is widely used within the investment management industry. This is the clearest way to show you your actual return (i.e. how much your money has grown) because it ignores any cash deposits or withdrawals you might have made in the meantime. In other words, it only tells you how much you’ve gained or lost from your investments, not what you’ve put in or taken out yourself.

On request, we can show you your return calculated by another method, called the ‘Internal Rate of Return (IRR)’. This shows the actual performance of your Plan including the effects of when you added or withdrew money from your Plan.

You can have and pay into as many General Investment Accounts as you like. This is particularly useful if you’ve used your annual ISA allowance, as you can continue to invest your money in multiple GIAs without any investment limits.

You have to be a UK resident aged 18 or over to open a General Investment Account. For under 18s, we offer a Junior ISA, which can only be opened by the parent or legal guardian of a child who fits the eligibility criteria.