Hello there! We wrote this article in 2025. Platform fees have changed a lot since then, particularly in the UK! Look out for an updated article coming soon…..

Vanguard UK announced a change to their fees and it inspired us to do a platform review to help you choose the best platform for your investments. Check out our Vanguard monthly fee update here which details the changes.

Our philosophy at Rebel Finance School is, first and foremost, to teach you how to think about money, not to just tell you what to do. We aren’t financial advisors and so can’t give out advice. The more we can empower you to make informed decisions, the more confident you become and the more in charge you feel of your money and your life in general.

Our aim is to help you feel empowered, confident, and happy with your financial decisions and future. By understanding how to choose a platform, you can trust in the actions you take and feel more assured.

“Is this just for the UK?” I hear you cry! The answer is no, the thought process is the same wherever you are in the world.

We want to show you how to do the sums for yourself, so you can make the best decision for your circumstances and understand any impact on where to invest when your circumstances change or the platform you’re with changes in some way.

We’re not going to tell you what to do. We’re going to teach you how we think about it and what to look out for.

This post is a guide to choosing a platform that suits your needs.

You can read about specific UK Platforms in our UK Platform review. In that review we’ll go through our top platform picks and give some opinions of the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of them. There’ll even be a naughty list of who we say AVOID at all costs.

First, read this article to learn how to choose a platform and then look at our UK Platform review to see a short list to choose from.

Warning: this is not a quick read. Grab a cup of tea and sit down and enjoy the article. Where to invest your money is a hugely important decision in your financial life and you don’t want to rush that.

None of this is financial advice, we’re not financial advisers, we’re just here to talk about our experiences and how we’d go about making some of these decisions, so you can understand how to make a choice for yourself.

Alan doesn’t even own a suit and we will never try and sell you investments!

All the fees in the article are up to date as of January 2025 but as we know platforms like to change things up so please make sure you check details on their websites before making big decisions.

Full disclaimer

We’re going to assume a couple of things about you in this article!

1. You are ready to invest. Read our Am I ready to invest? article to check if this is you.

2. You’ve attended Rebel Finance School and/or understand:

• What index funds are and how they’re superior to actively managed funds
• What the different tax advantaged accounts are in your country (SIPP and ISA in the UK)
• The difference between an ETF and Index fund

If this isn’t you, please feel free to carry on reading this article but you might come across some stuff you don’t understand. Please sign up to Rebel Finance School and we will guide you through it!

The very first investments Katie and I made into the stock market were through financial advisors. Both experiences ended badly for us. I lost my life savings in the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s and Katie invested with Sterling (which are now the Penny Group). If we had stuck with them we would now be nearly £1m worse off.

Yes you read that correctly. If we had stayed with the high fee IFA we would be £1 Million worse off. The stakes are high, this is an important decision to make and we’re here to guide you through how to think about it!

Luckily we came across the Financial Independence (FI) community and learned the importance of fees. You can read all about what we learnt from this first experience here: Importance of fees when investing.

Once we discovered how vital it is to keep fees low, Katie and I set out to find a platform that was low cost, trustworthy and would let us invest in low cost passive Vanguard Index Funds (what most of the Financial Independence world invests in).

When we started investing in 2015, you could only invest directly on Vanguard’s platform if you had over £100,000 to invest in one go (which we didn’t!). They didn’t have a SIPP, an ISA or an easy way to invest smaller sums of money.

Things have changed a lot since we started investing a few short years ago.

When we were figuring out which platform to use we created a little spreadsheet and compared fees for different platforms over time to see what the impact on our portfolio would be. This simple spreadsheet showed us that over time we would be better off with a fixed fee platform. You can see the impact of fees on your investments over time by using the Impact of Fees Tool we made for you.

Fixed fee means that you pay an annual fee for the service and not a percentage of your portfolio. We went online, searched for providers of SIPPs, ISAs and started to compare them.

At the time Halifax were one of the cheapest available and we decided to go with them.

However, their fee structure changed our investment habits. For every investment you made they charged a flat fee of £9.50. There was a lower fee for regular direct debit investments but we were both self-employed at that stage so our income was very lumpy and irregular. We got used to investing in lump sums and sucking up the £9.50 tax on every transaction.

Halifax let us invest in Vanguard Funds. When we started investing the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap didn’t even exist so we chose the Vanguard FTSE Developed World Ex UK. It was the most global fund we could get our hands on.

A lot of the decisions we made at the time were out of limitations of what was available. Since then the options available for all of us, have increased exponentially. On one hand, this is super cool that you have so many better options than we had but on the other hand it makes choosing far harder.

That is how Katie and I have ended up with the majority of our investments held with Halifax as the platform and Vanguard FTSE Developed World Ex UK as the fund. You can see the exact split of our funds amounts in our Annual Finance Review here.

We have a few other funds and platforms for old pensions and I have a Vanguard SIPP and ISA that I set up to be able to teach other people how to set them up.

With the new changes, Vanguard are going to be charging me more. Katie and I need to change our platforms and consolidate as well. This review is as much for us as it is for you to work out the best place to have our investments in 2025 and beyond!

Let’s get into it. How do you make a decision on which platform to use?

Before you even get into choosing a platform you have to understand your own situation.

Are you a brand new investor, investing 100 a month? You’ll get a very different answer to someone with a 200,000 portfolio who invests in lump sums once a year.

Here is what you need to know about your situation to be able to make a decision on which platform to go with…

Knowing the size of your portfolio is essential. Different platforms have different fee structures, and the cost of these fees depends on the size of your investments.

Smaller portfolios are better with percentage-based fees, while larger portfolios are better with flat fee structures.

Read this article to work out your net-worth or check your net-worth tracker to tot up your portfolio size in different account types.

You need to know this to work out how much it will cost you to invest with certain platforms. We are looking for a sum total of what you have invested in your Stocks and Shares ISAs, GIAs and your SIPPs.

What account types do you want to have? In the UK the options are…

• Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs): Lifetime ISAs, Stocks and Shares ISAs and Cash ISAs. We’re not going to talk about which Cash ISA provider to use in this article because this article is all about investing, not saving.
• Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs): Retirement accounts with tax benefits.
• General Investment Accounts (GIAs): Standard investment accounts with no tax advantages.

For your LISA, you may need a different platform from your SIPP and ISA because there are fewer options available for LISA. This is what Katie and I have ended up doing. Know what accounts you want and then we can see if the platforms have the account types you need. Not all platforms do LISAs and different platforms can be good for one account type and not another.

As Katie approached 40 last year we realised how good LISA accounts where and rushed to open one for her before the 40th birthday deadline. As we figured all that out for ourselves we created an entire series for YouTube on LISAs. You can watch the first video here.

Since you’ve got everything you need in the LISA series on YouTube, we won’t be covering them here in this article.

Different platforms have different fees depending on how often you invest. Vanguard have no fees on putting your money in but Halifax charge us per investment for irregular contributions (but not for regular monthly contributions).

It’s tricky to know this precisely but you need to have an idea or whether you’re going to invest regularly each month (what most employed people will do since they’re paid monthly) or more sporadically (more likely for self-employed people who have lumpy or irregular income).

Maybe even you are a bit of both. Regular monthly contributions but once or twice a year you top up the investments. Make a note of what you think you will do.

We’re going to assume you have watched Rebel Finance School and/or understand about index investing and are going to invest in broad based index funds or ETFs.

Different platforms have different types and varieties of funds available on them so you need to check to see if what you want is available on the platform you are reviewing.

Ok, now you know…

1. How much you have
2. What type of accounts you want
3. How much and how often you will invest and
4. What you’re going to invest in

We’ve done the fact finding stage, now we can go on to how to make your decision.

When choosing a platform to invest with there are 4 major things you need to consider:

Let’s tackle these one at a time…

Fees can kill your investments over time and some of the platforms are sneaky about their fees and not very transparent.

Every year that Katie and I run the Rebel Finance School course there is a lot of confusion around investing. People ask questions like “should I invest in my pension OR an Index fund?”.

We have been working to clear this up by explaining the 3 different levels of thinking when investing and what your mission is at each level.

The answer to the question “should I invest in my pension OR an index fund?” is not an either/or. You can do both because you can buy an index fund (fund level) in your pension (account level).

You are going to have different fees at each of these levels that you need to understand but at each level you have one main mission.

Important note here. If you are in the USA, there are lots of platforms that do not charge a platform fee. Zip! Nil! Nada! Free! Lucky you (not jealous at all).

For the rest of us around the world, there is usually a platform fee although there are some newer platforms in the UK that don’t charge. More on this in the UK Platform Review article.

Let’s go through the different fees to look out for one by one

There shouldn’t be any of these but the likes of St James’s Place (SJP), Penny Group, Wealth Managers and some IFAs etc. do have charges (spoiler alert – they’re on our naughty list).

The first company Katie invested with, Penny Group, charged 3% of every deposit she put in. This is horrendous and you have to avoid this stuff.

Most platforms won’t have a transfer in fee. The smart ones know that charging you to transfer to them will not entice you in!

Platforms may include commissions, which are fixed charges per trade, or percentage-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of the transaction amount. Some platforms also charge additional fees for specific services, such as currency conversion or expedited trades.

Sometimes there are fees for non-regular deposits and sometimes there are fees for certain types of deposits, such as buying individual stocks rather than funds or ETFs.

Vanguard doesn’t have any of these fees at all. Interactive Investor charges you £3.99 for individual trades but is free for regular investments.

This is a critical one to understand – if you’re investing every single week and paying a fee every time you can get hit hard!

Katie and I have most of our investments with Halifax and they have transaction fees. They charge you £9.50 every time you buy and sell something. This can mount up over time. Regular investing via direct debit is free on their platform.

It is important to understand these fees as we have found ourselves changing our behaviour to avoid fees and this may or may not be in our best interests.

Taking these into account when you are working out the least expensive way to invest is critical.

This is the fund fee that you pay for your investment fund. This varies by type of fund that you invest in.

Katie and I have nearly all our investments in the Vanguard FTSE Developed World Ex UK (0.14% fee) and the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap (0.23% fee)

In the USA and other parts of the world the fees for these types of funds are far lower. Katie and I are hoping that the increased competition in the UK will drive down prices over the coming years.

If you are comparing platforms and are going to buy the same fund in which ever platform you go for then you can ignore these from your comparison.

For example you might want to buy the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap. You could buy that fund with Vanguard, Interactive Investor, InvestEngine or Hargreaves Lansdown (and many others).

The OCF or fund fee is collected by the fund provider not the platform and is the same whichever platform you buy it on.

The only time you need to take these into account when choosing a platform is if you want fund A in platform X and fund B in platform Y and funds A and B have different charges. Then the best tool to compare this is Katie’s Fees Tool.

Broadly speaking there are two types of platform fee structures.

1. You’re charged a percentage of what you have invested.

2. You’re charge a fixed fee regardless of how much you have invested.

This is just for the privilege of having an account with them, it’s on top of the other fees we talked about already.

Percentage example

Wealthify charges you 0.6% of what you have with them.

If you happened to have £250,000 invested you would pay £1,500 a year in fees to them in platform fees (£250,000 x 0.60% = £1,500).

(To say we are not fans of Wealthify would be an understatement. Read more here)

Fixed fee example

For Halifax’s Stocks and Shares ISA they charge you a fixed amount of £36 a year regardless of how much you have in your account

If you had that same £250,000 invested with Halifax you would pay just £36.

In this mini-example you would pay over 40 times more in annual platform fees with Wealthify versus Halifax. Big difference!

We’re not saying go with Halifax, we’re using this example to show you how there can be dramatic differences between fixed fee and percentage annual platform fees depending on the size of your pot.

Katie has written a section at the end of this article showing you how to do the sums yourself to be able to compare annual platform fees.

In the fixed fee scenario no matter how big your investment pot (cake) you pay only a set fee each year.

This is awesome as you get a bigger cake and don’t have to share as much!

In the percentage fee scenario you pay a slice of your pot (cake) each year and as your cake grows so does the slice that the platform takes from it for doing the same amount of work. Great when you are starting, bad as you progress.

There are 2 situations when percentage based fees are good:

1. When you are starting out and you don’t have a lot a percentage means they won’t take a lot
2. Some of the platforms with percentage based fees have a cap, like Vanguard. This means they charge you a percentage up until £XXX and then don’t take any more. A cap on fees is super important to protect your investments. Vanguard’s cap is £375 a year.

We have talked about the different platform fees but aren’t some platforms now free?! Yes, yes they are. Trading 212 offers free ISAs and InvestEngine offers both free SIPPs and free ISAs?

If it’s free who’s paying? how do they make money? Completely free platforms worry Katie and me as they normally either end up charging or stop the service at some point as it isn’t worth their time.

That being said sometimes companies have fabulous free offers and you can take advantage of them and avoid being sold the stuff they do make money on!

InvestEngine are the first platform to offer a free SIPP in the UK. This is amazing as there is actually a lot of paperwork to get the Government top ups and more. They are doing a lot of work for you for free! From what I have researched here is how they offer it for free:

1. Single Window Trading. InvestEngine consolidates all customer orders and trades, executing them in a single transaction to minimise fees. While ETFs are typically tradable throughout the day, InvestEngine batches orders together, significantly reducing transaction costs.
2. Automation. Nearly all of the processes are automated and they don’t have as many people working for them (23 currently compared to over 900 at Vanguard UK). This lowers their costs dramatically compared to Vanguard which has a call centre and more people’s salaries to pay.
3. Fund Choice. Whilst the SIPP is free, InvestEngine hope that you go for their managed funds and Life Plan funds which charge fees of 0.25%.
4. Interest. Like other platforms InvestEngine earn interest on any of your money that isn’t invested. This is a common practice and a good reason you need to get all your money invested and working for you instead of them! Some other platforms pay you interest on uninvested funds (although the rate is different between them) but InvestEngine do not.
5. Transfers in. Currently InvestEngine only takes transfers from Vanguard into their platform which reduces their fees. They are working to expand this. They rushed this out to take advantage of the Vanguard fee increases and get customers from that platform over to theirs.

There is a lot to consider when choosing a platform and whether to go free or choose to pay a small fee for the service. Katie and I have some strong reservations about InvestEngine, more about that later.

Again, there shouldn’t be any fees for either moving your money to another provider or withdrawing to live off it in retirement but some providers do.

• AJ Bell Youinvest: £25 per withdrawal if you choose to take ad-hoc withdrawals from a SIPP
• Hargreaves Lansdown: £25 per withdrawal for ad-hoc withdrawals from your SIPP
• Fidelity: £30 per withdrawal for ad-hoc withdrawals from your SIPP

Vanguard has no fees for ad-hoc withdrawals from your SIPP.

As recently as a year ago Halifax had drawdown fees for their SIPPs. This meant when you changed to living off your pot you would be charged to get it out! They have since dropped these fees, but it is worth noting some of the sneakier ones still hide these fees in the small print. SJP has a list of different fees they apply as you go into drawdown on your SIPP.

There are so many different fees to understand and this is why it is so difficult to compare platforms. I really do believe it is in companies’ interest to make their fee structures so complex that we don’t really know how much we are paying in fees.

We’ve talked about a lot of different types of fees here. To summarise here’s a handy checklist of what to look out for!

• Fee to transfer in
• Transaction fees / Dealing Costs
• Ongoing Charges Figure (OCF)
• Platform Fee
• Withdrawal Fee
• Drawdown Fees

Think of the platform as the shop where you go to buy your investments. The funds are the products they have on their shelves.

It is a bit like going to Sainsburys and finding all the different products they have for sale there. Some are Sainsburys own brand and some are from other providers.

Just like you can buy only certain things in certain supermarkets the same is true of platforms and funds. We need to make sure you can buy the funds you want to buy through the platform you are choosing.

Your choice of fund is critical for your long term investment success. Pick the wrong fund and you end up with high fees and poor performance. Pick the right fund and you will start to make progress. Weeks 6-8 of Rebel Finance School teach you all about this.

When choosing a platform the challenge is that not all platforms have all the funds that are available. Think of it as if you went to Asda and tried to buy M&S Outrageously Chocolatey Biscuits. You aren’t going to find them!

It is the same with platforms, some only let you invest in their funds. For example with Vanguard you can only invest in Vanguard Funds (which is fine as they are great!). Similarly with Wealthify you can only invest in their own proprietary funds, which is bad as they are all actively managed and perform terribly. See our Wealthify review here and please warn anyone who has an account with them.

There are so many different fund types out there… active, passive, ESG, thematic and more. It would take forever to analyse them all so we are going to focus on the Rebel Finance School Effortless Investment Strategy that we talk about on the course.

Our strategy has 2 simple phases:

1. Asset Assembler: This is your initial phase where you invest your Freedom Fund 100% in the stock market in a simple low-fee global index fund and let it grow over the years.

The goal is to get a low cost, passive, global ETF or index fund.

2. Prosperity Protector: When you are about 3 years from retirement (whatever age that may be), you plan how you’re going to shield your Freedom Fund from the volatility of the stock market. This is to protect yourself from something called sequence of returns risk.

Sequence of returns risk is the chance that the market crashes just after you have retired. There are many different ways to protect yourself against this risk.

We updated week 9 of Rebel Finance School to cover sequence of returns risk and all the different ways you can protect yourself against it.

The purpose of this article is to help you think through choosing a platform. When you review the different platforms check you can access low-cost global index funds or ETFs if you’re in the asset assembler phase and if you’re in the prosperity protector phase, also make sure they’ve got suitable bonds or other asset classes to use to shield yourself from volatility.

In the UK there are three types of accounts (plus a bonus) that you might have. The main three account types are:

1. ISA – Individual Savings Account
2. SIPP – Self Invested Personal Pension
3. GIA – General Investment Account

4. LISA – Lifetime Individual Savings Account (this is the bonus since really it’s a type of ISA)

Not all platforms have all the account types. We currently have a LISA with Hargreaves Lansdown and most of our other accounts with Halifax because Halifax don’t do a LISA.

As you choose a platform you will need to make sure they have the accounts you are looking for.

There are advantages to having all your accounts with one platform. Some platforms offer fee discounts if you use more of their products. It is easier to transfer money between your accounts on the same platform rather than between platforms. And you also learn how their system works and how to get the most out of it.

We have come to really value having all our money in one platform allowing us to move money between accounts easily and reduce time out of the market.

Your mission at account level is to choose tax advantaged accounts that protect your money from being taxed.

Here is a brief overview of the account types in the UK:

A SIPP is a personal pension that you manage. You pay into it, you choose the funds and then you decide how you draw down the money when you retire.

With these accounts, you don’t pay income tax on the personal contributions you pay into them. Usually you’ve already paid income tax on it so you’ll get that tax refunded, either directly into the SIPP (for basic rate part) or in a self assessment tax return for any additional tax you’re owed.

You do pay tax when you come to withdraw it.

If you aren’t planning on retiring before you can get to this account (10 years before state retirement age for most of us) then this is the account to go for. It has some fabulous tax benefits.

Summary: no tax on the way in, tax on the way out.

You contribute to these accounts with money you have already paid income tax on. However you don’t pay any tax on what you take out. Any profit made is yours! YAY!

Tax on the way in, no tax on the way out.

They come in a few different flavours:

1. Cash ISAs

These work fairly similarly to a high interest savings account, in that your gains will be at a known interest rate (free of tax). Katie and I think they are a fairly pointless type of account as a lower rate tax payer gets the first £1,000 of interest earnt tax free anyway!

We think cash ISAs are a waste of your tax allowances and you should focus on types 2 and 3.

2. Stocks and shares ISAs

This is one of the most important types of account. You can invest in funds or ETFs, which grow tax free and you can withdraw the money tax free when you come to live off it in retirement.

3. Lifetime Individual Savings Accounts (LISAs)

These are some of the most wonderous tax advantage accounts but come with lots of limitations. You can only open them before you hit 40 but you get a 25% bonus on what you contribute (which is the equivalent of being tax free at the lower rate), they grow tax free and when you withdraw the money it’s tax free too! This is the only account we have ever found where you don’t get taxed at either end. But you can only access the money in a LISA if you’re purchasing your first home (with several additional restrictions) or if you’re over 60.

Katie and I filmed an entire series about LISAs last year just before Katie’s 40th birthday. We needed to open a LISA ourselves so we worked out all the benefits, platforms and more there. Watch the series here.

A general investment account is nothing special at all. It has no tax benefits, restrictions or redeeming features. The only reason you would ever really need one of these accounts is if you have filled up your SIPP and ISA allowances.

Why are these so bad? You contribute with money you have already paid tax on and then when you come to sell those investments you pay tax again! Taxed at both ends! Not pleasant.

HOWEVER… paying some tax is better than not investing and leaving it on the sidelines uninvested. So if you’ve maxed out your SIPP and ISA allowances and you have more to invest, you should absolutely look at investing it in a General Investment Account.

The final aspect of the whole equation and probably the hardest part to evaluate. How do you know who to trust with your hard earned cash? Who are you going to put your faith into?

How easy is the platform to use? Do you feel comfortable with your life’s savings with that firm?

We consider all the other points above with fees, account availability, fund availability and then finally the x-factor. Trust and customer service.

Here is what we consider when we are looking at platforms:

1. Have we heard of the platform? If you hang around in the Rebel Finance School Facebook Group or the Financial Independence groups you will hear about the same platforms again and again, Vanguard, Interactive Investor and more.
2. Do they have good customer service? This is difficult to tell but we do have a test that works for us. We call them or email them and ask them questions. You will soon find out if they are helpful or not!
3. Are they free? The completely free platforms worry us a little bit. We have seen so many good services come and go which start out for free and then have to monetise to continue.

We personally would be willing to pay a little bit more for good customer service with a platform we trusted. Fees is one VERY important factor, but paying a small fee to have a platform you are confident will be around a long time is even more critical for us.

We have invested with Halifax for many years. Halifax’s SIPP is administered by AJ Bell. Meaning that Halifax just put their badge on it and AJ Bell do all the heavy lifting.

I have had so many arguments with AJ Bell and Halifax over the years we have had accounts with them. They change the rules, they held up my investments and they are just rude on the phone. I found the Halifax team to be supportive but the people actually doing the work, AJ Bell, are terrible. I have ended up writing to the Halifax CEO a few times to sort out problems.

I don’t know about you but this is not how I want to spend my time at all. A certain level of customer service and support is really important. Part of the reason why Katie and I are looking at switching up our platforms.

By the end of these two articles we are going to make a decision on what to do with our investments and where to place our SIPPs, ISAs and GIAs.

As part of this process we started looking at InvestEngine as they offer a SIPP with no platform fee. Sounds incredible but is it too good to be true?

As we researched all the different providers with Ninja Martin and Ninja Lisa we got to discussing InvestEngine. Their SIPP is free, why would we all not move our money there now and save the fees? I started to wonder, do I want to move my money there? My feeling was no but I wanted to understand a little more why, so I did some research. There are three reasons I would not move my SIPP to InvestEngine.

1. They are currently a loss making business. They have 23 staff and made losses of £4.2million in 2022 and that rose to £4.9million in 2023. They are raising capital and growing their business but they are losing a fortune and profitability doesn’t seem like it’s coming any time soon.
2. Fee free products – with the company losing money, buying market share and raising more money I can see a time coming when they will have to generate more profits. I do not have a crystal ball but I know you can’t continue to make a loss forever without upping fees somewhere.
3. Uncertainty. The main thing I want for my investments is a platform I trust, has good customer service, low fees and I know will be around for a while. I am too uncertain in InvestEngine’s future and pricing model to gamble moving to them.

This is why when Katie and I look at some of the free platforms we feel a bit nervous.

It seems to be a different story with Trading 212 who have very solid financials and profitability behind their free Stocks and Shares ISA.

If you have an InvestEngine SIPP there is no need to move or do anything. Just keep an eye on it and if charges do appear then re-evaluate them.

These are the kinds of things we consider when we are looking at platforms.

We have reviewed all the different factors in making a decision about which platform to go with.

1. Fees
2. Funds availability
3. Account availability
4. Trustworthiness and Customer Service

When we did this exercise it helped us eliminate a bunch of platforms and left us with a shortlist. More on this in the UK Platform Review.

The final element is to help you understand how to work out how much it would cost you to invest with the different platforms. You know the Donegans like cold hard maths!

After running Rebel Finance School, the Tour of New Zealand and then meetups in the UK we have seen how confusing it is for people to understand the true costs of their investments. Whether that is an investment property, an IFA, a wealth management company or a high fee platform. Knowing the numbers and the true cost of your investments is critical. Here’s Katie to show you how!

There’s two ways of looking at the fees you are going to pay on your platform.

If you’re interested in how much the fees on different platforms and funds will cost you over the long term, you can use the Impact of Fees tool. Use the tool to put in the platform fees and fund fees for two different investment options and see how different they are in fees over the decades. If you need help, you’ll find a full description of how to use the tool at the same link.

This is a fascinating way to see the true impact of the difference between a platform that charges you 0.15% capped (like Vanguard) and a 1% fee. It can be staggering. The tool allows you to include all the different fees, IFA fees and more and get a true long term picture of the cost.

At one kitchen table in New Zealand we saw a $600,000 difference between using their current IFA and set up and InvestNow.

The other way to look at it is to work out how much the platforms on your shortlist will cost you for one year of investing.

When Katie and I are choosing between different platforms, we know which low cost index fund we want to invest in. There is an Ongoing Charge Figure (OCF) on that fund and that OCF will be the same regardless of which platform you buy it from. Whoever is providing the fund collects the OCF, separately from the platform fee.

That means when it comes to comparing the platforms on price/fees, you can ignore the OCF (because that will be the same on all platforms) and just look at what the platform is charging you.

On the other hand, if you’re looking at two different funds and trying to work out which one will have lower fees, you can just compare the OCF on the two funds.

Want to compare fund A in platform X with fund B in platform Y over the years? That’s when you’d use the Impact of Fees tool.

Ok, let’s assume you’re choosing between buying the same fund in various platforms… how do you work out the annual amount you’ll pay in platform fees? Here are the steps:

A) You need to know stuff about you:

• how much you have in your pot
• what type of account you’re getting
• how regularly you’ll be investing.

Let’s assume you currently have 20,000 in a SIPP and you’re planning on investing on an ad-hoc basis. You reckon you’ll invest 4 times a year.

B) You need to go to the platform’s website and look up the annual platform fee and the trading fees (what you’ll pay each time you buy). Be sure to read the fee page in detail as often there are caveats and extra details in the fine print.

We’ll cover some more examples in the UK Platform Review article. We want to teach you how to work this out for yourself so that you can be confident when looking at any platform even if we haven’t included it in our review.

Let’s look at Interactive Investor as an example (all figures as at time of writing in January 2025)

Annual platform fee
Interactive Investor’s website says you pay £5.99 a month if you have less than £50,000 and £12.99 a month if you have more than £50,000 for a SIPP.

In our example you have £20,000 so you’ll pay 12 x £5.99 = £71.88

Trading fees

It says that you have to pay £3.99 every time you invest. You’re going to invest 4 times a year so this will be 4 x £3.99 = £15.96

Total Annual Cost
So the total annual platform fee is £71.88 + £15.96 = £87.84

Let’s do another example so you can start to see how this works and apply it to your own situation…

Annual platform fee

It says if you have between £0 and £32,000 you pay £4 a month which is £48 a year

Trading fees

Nil. Zip. Nada! WOO!

Total Annual Cost

The total annual platform fee you will pay is £48 a year! YAY.

The final example is a percentage based fee with Hargreaves Lansdown. Let’s say you have a £300,000 portfolio in index funds in a SIPP with them. We invest 4 times a year.

Annual Platform Fee
Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) has a tiered fee if you buy index funds in a SIPP. It is way more expensive to buy index funds with them than ETFs so we would never actually do this but we’ll use this as an example to show you how it works. More on this in the UK Platform Review

HL charge:

• 0.45% on the first £250,000
• 0.25% on what you have between £250,000 and £1m
• 0.1% on what you have between £1m and £2m
• 0% on what you have above £2m

Since in this example you have £300,000 with them, so you pay 0.45% on the first £250,000 and then 0.25% on the remaining £50,000.

How much does this work out at?

• First £250,000: £250,000 x 0.45% = £1,125
• Remaining £50,000: £50,000 times 0.25% = £125

So the total annual platform fee is £1,125 + £125 = £1,250

Trading Fees

You are going to be investing 4 times a year which the first 9 trades a month cost £11.95 each.

4 x £11.95 = £47.80 trading fees

Total Annual Cost
£1,250 (platform fee) + £47.80 (trading fees) = £1,297.80

This is why it is so important to figure out the fees and your investing style as it can make a huge difference to your financial destiny.

We know you might have lots of questions so we are organising a livestream Q&A to help. If you have missed it live you can watch it here on catch up and I bet you someone else has asked the question you have! Tune in Monday 3rd February 2025 8pm UK time if you want to join us.

You can hit notify on YouTube to get a notification when it goes live.

With so many sharks swimming around in the finance world, knowledge is your best protection. If you can take the time to understand your investments, truly understand the platforms and be able to calculate the costs no one will be able to pull the wool over your eyes

Our aim in this article is to arm you to make great financial decisions. We are 15% worried that there is a lot of information in this article and we don’t want to overwhelm you. We are also confident in your ability to work through each part section by section and combined with the UK platform review we think you will have everything you need to make the best decision for your financial future.

If we haven’t explained something well, if you felt confused please put your comments below and we will use the comments to update and improve the article. We can’t get better and do a better job for you without feedback.

These two articles about platforms have turned out to be a bigger job than Katie and I ever imagined. We are so grateful to Ninjas Martin and Lisa for starting them and creating the spreadsheet that helped us work all this out and to the army of other Ninjas who checked what we wrote and improved our thinking. This was a team effort.

Please put your biggest take away from the article in the comments below.

Peace and Pineapples.

Katie and Alan