Get up to 51,000 Virgin Points for opening a Virgin Money Stocks & Shares ISA

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• Jonathan says:

  20 Mar20 March 06:15

  I’m thinking if I can top up my ISA I’ve already got using my VS credit card to earn some additional points on top, although I’m not sure if this is doable and whether or not it’d be classed as a cash transaction…

  Anyone got any experience of trying to do this at all ?

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    20 Mar20 March 08:08

    Are you sure you’ll earn points for what is in effect a cash transation?

    A read of the T&Cs for both the card and the ISA is essential reading.

    • Jonathan says:

      20 Mar20 March 13:30

      I don’t know if topping up their ISA using one of their credit cards is defined as what’s essentially a cash transaction, hence is to why I asked about it the first place !

      It’d be good if it does though, I think the JL and Tesco credit cards both have earn points if you buy travel money from each both of them, obviously Tesco travel money, you need to be using a Tesco credit (and or maybe Clubcard Pay+, I’m really not sure though) card, any other credit card will treat it as a cash transaction

      This sort of thing is unfortunately a very grey area, and you often need to do a test transaction too see what happens, as it’s usually not even written the deep print what’ll happen…

• Mouse says:

  20 Mar20 March 06:18

  Beware! Fund performance has been poor and fees are high. Holding your cash there for the minimum six months gets at best a 1% bonus (@ 1p per point), but over the past 5 years you would have done better in four of them to invest in a low fee unmanaged global tracker compared to the Virgin adventurous fund, even taking into account the bonus. And you can often get up to 1% cash bonus when transferring to someone like ii. Shop around!

  • Ironside says:

    20 Mar20 March 06:47

    Exactly this. It does not feel like a rational financial decision to base investments on the number of points received.

    Unless, of course, it does. If you were going to do it anyway, then fine. If the risk / reward of the investment matches your profile, fine. If you expect the actual performance to be positive, all good.

    But the value of £50,000 only has to go negative by 1% to wipe out all of the value of those 50,000 points – and that’s ignoring the management fee which does the same anyway.

  • Jonathans says:

    21 Mar21 March 06:55

    I disagree with this. I put £5k in speculatively in August 2023. Got an 8% return, 408,000 virgin points and been charged just £11.36. I’m quite happy with all that.

• Alexander says:

  20 Mar20 March 07:53

  Fees are high at 0.75% per year. Less than half on other platforms. I live chasing points but when you start basing quite serious financial decisions on it, you need to be careful.

  Don’t get me wrong – appreciate the article but I’d steer clear.

• Ken says:

  20 Mar20 March 07:59

  If you are choosing this rather than a low fee tracker both a similar risk profile then it’s highly likely that you will be paying much more than 1p per point.

  Strictly for mugs only.

  • BBbetter says:

    20 Mar20 March 08:02

    Yep, vanguard is 0.15%.

• jj says:

  20 Mar20 March 08:17

  I am not a.financial advisor. Anything I say here is the random musingof a random internet dude.

  But, to be fair, 0.3% platform charge is mid-market for fees. Anyone putting on this year’s full ISA allowance would pay £75 fees to earn 20,000 Virgin points for the first year. No exit charges, so it’s easy to move on, and fees with, for example, Vanguard would still be £30. I reckon a net £45 for 20,000 points is a good deal.

  The first issue that I see is that Virgin doesn’t allow a proper range of funds to be bought, and its own funds carry bigger charges than many others.

  The second issue is that I couldn’t bring myself to invest with I provider whose product homepage starts with the slogan, ‘Kiss our ISA’. Call me old fashioned, but I want a platform that doesn’t dumb down.

  • Lady London says:

    20 Mar20 March 08:38

    +1 @jj and thanks fot the smile in your last paragraph.

    I was also wondering is this part of the business splitting from the banking side when/if that goes to Nationwide?

    • aseftel says:

      20 Mar20 March 08:49

      It’s barely attached to the banking side at the moment.

  • ken says:

    20 Mar20 March 08:52

    Except it’s not really £45 is it.

    1) You have to keep your money in until 31st October
    2) Proper range ? They offer 3 funds – all with higher charges than anything I would choose
    3) The performance of the funds have been worse in 4 of the last 5 years. The best performance with their comparitor is when both fell by roughly 9%

    4) The performance in 2 of those years has been almost 3% worse than their comparator

    5) There are alternative cash back offers or bonus offers available from other providers. Surely if we are comparing offers we should look at the alternative.

    6) You are out of the market for a short time while doing a transfer in or out.

    Agree with the ‘Kiss our ISA’ comment though.

    • jj says:

      20 Mar20 March 09:19

      @ken, we’re more or less agreeing. Apart from the Kiss our ISA silliness, the main reason I won’t be taking up the offer is the lack of decent funds.

      Your point about the opportunity of cost of missing out on alternative offers is a very good one, though.

• TimM says:

  20 Mar20 March 10:50

  All good points made in the previous comments. I would just add that the ISA rules are changing for the new tax year so that anyone over 18 can have multiple ISAs across multiple providers even of the same type. The annual limit is unchanged at £20 000 between them.

  • Axel says:

    20 Mar20 March 13:39

    Hargreaves L were basically doing this already.

    The loophole for 16 & 17 years for ISAs has also been closed/ or you’ve only got a couple of weeks left to use it.

• = madnes says:

  20 Mar20 March 11:10

  You got to be a mug to transfer something like an ISA for points. I bet it would be it cheaper to keep your portfolio (whatever composition it is) where it is, and buy the points.

  • Jonathan says:

    20 Mar20 March 12:58

    Depends if you’ve reached your limit on how many points you can buy…

• AnotherUser says:

  20 Mar20 March 15:37

  Depending how much you’re transferring or investing, worth comparing with the cash bonus that Investengine are offering for transfers and new customers. A bonus ranging from 2% to about 0.7% depending on transfer amount. They also don’t charge a platform fee if you’re holding some ETFs, and allow in specie transfers for some assets.

  I know this is a site about points, but compared to the alternatives this sounds like an expensive way to buy some Virgin points!

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