InvestEngine Full Reviews

 Key Future:

How Invest Engine Works

InvestEngine open cracked

Is Invest Engine good for beginners

InvestEngine account options

How much is Invest Engine 

Is Invest Engine safe to use

A quick recap and more info 

InvestEngine pros and cons

Invest Engine customer reviews

Thoughts

How Invest Engine Works (investment portfolio)

Invest Engine is designed to be as easy as possible for you to either manage your own investments, or get their experts to manage it for you.

You can either use their websites, or phone app, choose one of the account options below, and you're ready to go.

DIY portfolio

Those are quite special. Aside from having no fees, it's a pretty great way of building and managing your own portfolio. Once you have decided which ETFs you want to invest in (there's over 500), you can then select the weight that each of your chosen ETFs has in your portfolio.


For instance, let's say you have 10 ETFs you'd like to invest in, you can set 10%  per ETFs automatically.
You can set whatever weight you like too, so you can have 1% in one ETF, and 15% in another- you get the idea!

As your investments grow over time, they will grow different rates( and some may not grow) which means the weight of each ETF within your portfolio will change over time too, so one great investment might start at 5%  of your portfolio, but end up at 10% after say a year.

That could be an issues for some investor's who want the weight of each investment within their portfolio to remain constant+to manage risk)......
This bits really great- you can hit one button to rebalance your portfolio back to your original preferred weighting.

InvestEngine will buy or sell part of your portfolio portfolio to get back to the perfect balance that you want. 

You can just buy and sell investment manually too.

There also an autoinvest features, which automatically Invest your money into the investment you have chosen. So you can be completely hands-off if you want to.

Experts managed portfolios

If you don't want to manage your own investments portfolio or want an expert to manage some, or most of your money, you can choose a managed portfolios.
This is where you simply do nothing! All you do is add your money, and the experts at InvestEngine handle everything, you just watch your money grow over time.
You have 2 portfolio options to choose from, a growth portfolio or an income portfolio.

Growth portfolio

 This is where your money is Invested with a view to simply increase your money over time, which is called capital growth. Investment are made across the world to best manage risk and increase return on your money.

Income portfolio

This is where your money is Invested to provide you with a regular income, rather than just for capital growth.
The strategy is keep to super- safe investment that pay a regular dividend (which is a payment from a company to it's Investors)

The income is also paid straight into your bank account.

InvestEngine open cracked

On the surface, InvestEngine looks like a no-frills investment company somewhere you can invest hassle-free. But it's much more than that. It's an all- round investment platform(that's somewhere you can make investments) perfect for investors of all kinds.

You can choose to manage everything yourself, but there's hand's-off investment options too , where your investment are managed by their experts, you just sit back, relax and watch your money grow (on a long term).

Here's the best bit, it's the best cheapest investment platform out there by far.

There are literally no fee if you want to manage your own investments! And if you want to their expert managed options, the fee is only 0.25%. ( other expert - managed platform typically cost 0.75% )

You still get all the bells and whistles of the good investment platform, such as a great mobile app and website to manage everything, a stock & shares ISA to benefit from tax-free investing and great customer support service.

There's just one limitations- you can only invest in exchange-traded funds ETFs which are groups of stocks and shares (and sometimes other assets such as commercial property and bonds - which are essentially business loans that pay interest), all wrapped up together, into a fund, and the fund itself is managed by experts.

ETFs are a great way in invest, and incredibly popular only use ETFs anyway. You just can't buy individual stocks and shares directly, such as Google or Netflix, they have to be part of ETFs.

If you want to buy individual company shares, unveiling world of sofi invest

There's a huge range to choose from on InvestEngine with over 500ETFs, so you have got more than enough options! By the way, you can get up to £2,500 bonus when you sign up when topping up or transferring an ISA (unit April 30th).

Is Invest Engine good for beginners?

The answer is YES it is we wouldn't recommend starting out with a self-managed portfolio if you are a beginner (a portfolio is what your investment are called), which is where you're making the investment decisions yourself. 

But with InvestEngine you can benefit from the cheap costs of investing using a portfolio managed by experts.

There's no fees to set up your account, no fees to open and use a stock's & shared ISA (Which is where you can invest tax-free)

There's no fees to InvestEngine when investment are bought and sold. In fact, the only cost you will to InvestEngine is a 0.25% management fee.

But there are other fees included with investing, whichever platform you use( more on those below).

If you compared this with Nutmeg or moneyfarm both popular investment platform for beginners, you will be paying between 0.45-0.75%. And if you use a traditional investment platform like Hargreaves lansdown, it's nearer 2% for them to manage everything for you.

The minimum investment is also only £100, compared to £500 for Nutmeg, and other popular investment apps such as moneyfarm. Although with wealthy it's just £1.

Plus, with InvestEngine, you can create a smaller separate self-managed portfolio when you feel a bit more confident, and start making your own investments too.

InvestEngine account options 

General investment account (GIA)

This is the standard investing account, called a General Investment Account (GIA). This is where you might have to pay tax on the profit your money makes (Caiiptain Gains Tax, Income Tax and Dividend Tax).

However depending on your investment balance, you might not end up paying tax at all - with capital Gains Tax, you have an allowance of E3,000 profit,per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), before you have to pay any tax- and that's Only when you sell your Investments. 


The good thing about these account is that you can have as many as you like, across all different Investment platforms, and you can pay in as much as you like too. 


Stocks and shares ISA

You can also open a stock and shares ISA with InvestEngine. This accounts allow you to save up to E20,000 per tax year (your ISA allowance), and everything you make is completely tax free, forever!

Personal pension

There's is also a personal pension, technically called a self- invested personal pension,or SIPP.

This is were you can invest for retirement, and benefit from all all amazing tax benefits pensions have, such as your money growing tax-free, and getting a massive 25% bonus from the Government on everything you contribute - and if you're a higher rate taxpayer (40%) or additional rate taxpayer (45%), you can claim some of tax back at those rates too (on a self Assessment tax return).

You might pay tax when you start withdrawing your money,it all depends on your income at the time, but 25% will always be tax-free.

And, you won't be able to withdraw any cash until you're 55 years old (57 from 2028).

To learn more about SIPPs, here's our guide to the best SIPPs,or visit the InvestEngine website .


Nut's about money tip: if you're looking for expert to manage your pension, check out pensionBee, it's easy to use, low fees and a great track record of growing pensions over time.

Business account

If you have a limited company, you can open an account with InvestEngine (which isn't that common). This means you can Invest your company's spare case to (hopefully) make your business even more money over time.

There's still no fees to manage it yourself, and the low-fee managed options too.

You can also get your money back quickly if you need it, and with no exit fees.


Junior ISA, lifetime ISA


Unfortunately at the moment, you can't open a junior ISA (saving money for your kids), or a life time ISA (saving money for your first home, with a 25% government bonus).

How much is InvestEngine 

You might have noticed we have mentioned the fees quite a bit! Or the fact there are no fees! 

The only fee you will pay to InvestEngine is 0.25% if you decide you like a managed portfolios. And that's cheap! It's the lowest fee you will find Investments platform for expert managed Investing. Typical fee for digital wealth manger's are around 0.75% which reduce if you invest more money. A rough guidelines of 0.35% for those with over £100,000 invested. The more popular investment platform are Moneyfarm and Nutmeg.

And if you wanted to invest in a more traditional way, with a financial advisor handling everything for you, fees can be as much as 5%! However, you will still have to pay fees that the ETFs themselves charge, which are around 0.2% depending on which ETF, and those fees are paid by everyone who owns the ETF, not just InvestEngine customers 

Note: ETFS   are held by lots of investors across the world, and used by other investment platforms 

And there's also a hidden cost of buying an ETF, called a spread fee, which again everyone who invests in an ETF would pay, and this fee is the difference between the price to buy an ETF and the price to sell an ETF, and it's often 0.07%.

So all in all, if you wanted a managed portfolio, you'd be paying 0.52%, very cheap! Broken down like this:

  • Fee : Management fee
  • Cost: 0.25%
  • Fee: ETF management fee (charged by all investment platforms)
  • Cost: 0.20%
  • Fee: Spread fee (charged by all investment platforms)
  • Cost: 0.07%
  • Total Fee =0.52%

Customer Service support

The customer support services is good. You can email, or send them a message directly on the website or app.
And if you prefer, they will actually speck to you over the phone! A big bonus for a company in financial services, where they'll typically make you go around the house before you can speck to someone or never at all 
The support hours are from 5:30am to 9pm on weekdays, and 8:30am to 5:30pm on the weekends.

Is Invest Engine safe?

Yep it is. InvestEngine is authorized and regulated by the Financial conduct Authority(FCA), who are  the people who make sure your money is safe, by reviewing and approving companies who look after your funds.

Your money is also protected by the Financial service compensation scheme (FSCS), which means if anything should happen to invest Engine, such as going out of business (very unlikely) you d get up to £85,000 back.

But there's even more protection from customers too. Your money is held in a separate protected trust account. Which is completely separate to Invest Engine business bank account. This means all the money would be returned to customers if Invest Engine were to crack down. 

An easy recap and more info

Mobile App: You can manage everything from your phone, on both Apple and Android device. These apps are rested 4.6 out of 5 pretty great.

 No exist Fee: There's no fee to close your account and use another provider, you can leave whenever you like if you choose too. Invest Engine are confident you won't leave, so no need to charge fee unlike some investment platforms.

Withdrawl: You can make a withdraws for free at any time you like, and it's free to do.

 Minimum amount : The minimum amount you can invest is quite low -just £100 (compared to an average of around £500 with other platforms)

Business Account  :If you're a business owner, you can invest your company spare cash too.

Invest Engine pros and cons

Here quick run through of the pros and cons:
Pros:
  • Free fee investing (0%fee)
  • ISA
  • Easy to use 
  • Personal pension
  • Business 
  • Great range of ETFS
  • Very low cost managed option (0.25%)
  • Low minimum investment (£100)
  • Great customer service
Cons:
  • Not much else
  • Only ETF

Review Conclusion

Invest Engine has the highest score on Trust pilot (the popular reviews websites,) that's we've ever seen for a finance company! A massive 4.5 out of 5, from 900 reviews.
It's particularly impressive as companies in finance tend to have much lower score in general as the customer service trend to be very poor.
How ever, with Invest Engine, lots of the reviews are complementing their great customer services, alongside the experience in general.
Invest Engine app is rated 4.8 stars in  App store  while on Google play 4.5 star .


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