Why transfer and consolidate your investments before the end of the tax year?

If you're a seasoned investor, you've probably memorised the main messages ahead of 5 April: take stock of your finances, make the most of your tax-free allowances, and top up your ISA and pension if you can. Great. 

But if you're a seasoned investor with multiple investment accounts? Then this process is likely to be more painful for you than others. Not great. 

We explain how consolidating your existing investments could help you to reduce your overall financial admin and potentially your costs. And if you register for Nutmeg's transfer offer to do this, you could also get 1% cashback to boost your portfolio. Excellent.

What is Nutmeg's transfer offer?

If you initiate a transfer of at least £10,000 to Nutmeg from eligible investments by 30 May 2025, and keep it invested until 30 May 2026, you'll get 1% back in cash added to your Nutmeg account. You'll get cashback on the first £500,000 that you transfer – meaning you'll get between £100 and £5,000. It's then your choice to withdraw the cash or pick which investment pot it goes into. Start that summer 2026 vision board now!

Product rules and terms and conditions apply.

These can be found on our website, but we've highlighted some important points below:

• You need to register first to qualify for the offer.
• The offer is open to existing and new Nutmeg clients. If you're not yet a customer you'll need to open an account.
• You can make as many transfers as you like from existing ISAs, pensions, Lifetime ISAs (LISAs), Junior ISAs (JISAs), or Child Trust Funds held elsewhere. To open a new Nutmeg JISA, the child must be under the age of 16. To transfer into an existing Nutmeg JISA, the child has to be under 18.
• The £10,000 minimum is a combined figure, meaning it can be split across different products, e.g. £7,000 from a Junior ISA and £3,000 from a pension. 
• How much cashback you'll get depends on the total amount of your transfer that you still have invested with us on 30 May 2026.
• You won't get cashback on any money you withdraw before 30 May 2026, and if a withdrawal takes you below the £10,000 minimum investment, you won't qualify.
• If your transfers complete by 30 May 2026, you'll see your cashback in your Nutmeg account within 30 days of this date. If your transfers take longer, you'll get your cashback within 30 days of completion. 

Capital at risk. Initiate by 30 May 2025 and keep invested until 30 May 2026. Compare existing benefits and fees before transferring.

How to register

You can do this on our website, where you'll also find the cashback FAQs. It's important to note that you have to register for the promotional offer before initiating your transfer to be eligible. As always, if you have any other questions about this offer, or how Nutmeg works, just book a free call. 

What are the benefits of transferring and consolidating your investments?

Managing multiple investment accounts adds to our mental load. And when something is mentally taxing, we're less likely to do it. Even with the best intentions, it can be hard to keep on top of one's portfolio value and underlying holdings – let alone any potential changes in account interest rates, fees or management strategy that might have ended up in your spam folder. 

Whether it's combining fragmented ISA accounts you've opened over the years and taken your eye off, or workplace pensions from several former employers, consolidating your investments into a single, or fewer, providers can offer numerous benefits.

1. A clearer picture of your wealth

One of the primary advantages of consolidating your investments is gaining a clearer understanding of your financial situation.

With ISAs, it's easy to lose track of accounts, especially if you frequently switch providers for better deals. By transferring your ISAs, or any JISAs held on behalf of a child, into one place, you can more easily monitor their performance and understand the full value of your family's wealth. We explain more on this later in the article.

Similarly, consolidating your pension pots can provide a clearer view of your potential retirement income, helping you assess whether you're on track to achieve your retirement goals. 

2. Easier to keep on top of your tax allowances and limits

Navigating the tax world is inherently complex, especially when the Budget so often shakes up the status quo. Having investments in too many places can increase your tax admin and cortisol levels.

If you have fewer ISA and pension pots that you're actively contributing to each tax year, you'll likely find it easier to monitor your own contributions and ensure you're making the most of your tax allowances. However if you have several providers for each product, then it can be harder to keep tabs.

If you accidentally exceed your allowances of £20,000 for an ISA (of which up to £4,000 can be in a LISA) and £9,000 per child's JISA, HMRC will typically identify the excess contributions when they receive information from ISA providers. You'll then be required to remove the excess funds, and any income or gains already generated may be subject to tax. It can be a bit of a headache.

When it comes to pensions, things can be even more painful. For most people the annual allowance is 100% of their annual earnings, or £60,000, whichever is the lower. This includes contributions made by you or an employer. For very high income earners the annual allowance is less, due to the tapered allowance. You can carry over unused annual allowances from the previous three tax years, however there are some quite complicated stipulations and so it is worth speaking with an accountant or adviser in addition to your pension providers. If you make a mistake, the excess amount can be subject to an Annual Allowance Charge. That's more of a migraine. 

At Nutmeg, you can set a personalised contribution limit in the app to make it easier if you are managing multiple providers. Even so, fewer providers means less maths. 

3. Better visibility of your assets

Conducting a regular portfolio review can be complex if you've got multiple multi-asset portfolios from different providers. It doesn't help if your various investment managers use different terminology and scales to describe the management styles or risk levels applied to your portfolios. 

Consolidating your investments could help you better understand what you're actually invested in. This can help you stick to certain investment principles such as diversification. 

Some people believe that having multiple providers means you're automatically more diversified, as you don't have all of your eggs in one basket. Using different providers could offer access to a broader range of investments, where each could offer a distinct focus. However, merely having more investment accounts does not automatically increase diversification. 

You could find that your different providers are investing in products or funds with similar underlying assets. This could mean you have more overlapping investments than you realise. Having overlapping investments can actually reduce diversification, if you aren't keeping on top of it.

While having different investment pots with fewer providers could still result in some overlap, it should be easier to see what you own holistically. Nutmeg's app, for example, allows you to see a breakdown of your exposure, across different investment pots or tax wrappers (ISAs & pensions).

4. Reduced costs

Long-term cost efficiency can be another compelling reason to consolidate your investments. Fees associated with management, account maintenance, transactions, withdrawals, and platform activity (or in some cases even platform inactivity) can all erode your wealth.

Managing multiple small pension and ISA pots can be more expensive than fewer large ones. If your provider runs a fixed-fee or minimum-fee model and your underlying holdings are similar in different accounts (an issue we identified above), do you really need to be paying several different investment houses to analyse the same assets? The lower the value of your funds held in each account, the more you'll be impacted by several fixed or minimum fees.

On the other hand, if the total value of your investments is on the higher end, you could also be missing out on preferential fees if you spread them too thinly. For example, a Nutmeg client who invests above £100k benefits from reduced fees for the portion of their funds beyond this amount. 

It's crucial to review and compare the fees associated with your investments and choose providers that offer good value. Another task that's easier if you have fewer to wrangle. You should, however, check with your existing providers about any charges for transfers before transferring, as there may be some associated costs.

5. Easier for loved ones

It's never a pleasant topic, but it's worth addressing. Consolidating your investments can make it easier for your loved ones to manage your finances in the event of your passing or severe illness, which could provide peace of mind for you and your family. Streamlining your accounts simplifies the process of reporting a death and establishing beneficiaries. It could also help an attorney manage your affairs if you were to lose the mental capacity to be able to do this yourself. 

What are the benefits of having multiple investment accounts?

For many people, accumulating accounts can happen haphazardly – the result of switching jobs or experimenting with new apps over the years. If spreading your investments across providers wasn't your intention, you should still check whether consolidating would result in the loss of any favourable fees, guarantees or benefits before you transfer.

Some people choose to have multiple ISA or pension accounts for the following reasons:

1. Retaining benefits: Certain pensions have benefits that may be lost if you transfer them – such as a defined benefit pension scheme (sometimes called a final salary pension). If you're unsure if this applies to you, you can always check with Pension Wise. You should also consider getting financial advice.
2. Receiving employer contributions: Similarly, if you have a pension with a current employer you may lose employer-matched contributions if you consolidate this into a private pension. Nutmeg allows employer contributions into personal pensions, but you should check if your employer would be willing to contribute into a personal pension of your choosing, before making any decisions.
3. More choice: Experienced investors may find that no single ISA or pension provider offers access to all of their desired investment vehicles. If this is the case for you, you may want to only consider transferring where you have duplication. Check what your providers do and don't offer before consolidating.
4. FSCS cover: The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) provides compensation up to £85,000 per person, per financial institution – assuming they are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and so having multiple accounts below this limit can be reassuring.

What happens to my investments when I transfer them?

Do ISA or Pension transfers affect my annual allowance? 

Recent research carried out by Opinium on behalf of Nutmeg found that 23% of UK investors surveyed believed that transferring an 'old' ISA would impact their allowance for the current tax year.1 This is clearly a commonly-held misconception.

If you transfer an ISA, JISA, LISA or pension using your chosen provider's official transfer process then the transfer won't affect your annual allowance in the current tax year. It does not matter if you contributed the funds in the current tax year or previous tax years, and any returns remain free from tax.

For example, you could transfer £60,000 saved across three ISAs (of which £14,000 was contributed in the current tax year). In this scenario, all £60,000 could be transferred without impacting your annual allowance. Your remaining allowance would still be £6,000, as your annual allowance is £20,000 and you've already contributed £14,000 this tax year. You can also now choose to transfer part of an ISA – whether the contributions were made in this tax year or previous. This partial transfer rule change came into effect on 5 April 2024. 

The pension's annual allowance is more complicated, which you can read more about here. However, the same principle applies that the transfer itself does not count as a new contribution.

Never withdraw the money yourself. If you withdraw money from one ISA to contribute to another, you’ll lose the tax benefits and that money will count towards your annual allowance. If you withdraw from a pension, you may also have to pay tax on this, which could be up to 55% if you are under 55.

You should also keep in mind that if you transfer from an ISA into a LISA, the transfer will count as a LISA contribution, so you can’t transfer more than the annual £4,000 LISA allowance. Nutmeg does not facilitate an ISA into LISA transfer presently. 

Would my investments stay in the market during a transfer?

While the whole process of an ISA or pension transfer may take several weeks, your money is unlikely to be out of the market for more than a few days. This may mean losing out on potential returns during this short time (but also avoiding potential losses). 

So should I transfer and consolidate my investments? 

Having investments in different places could give you more choice, and your existing products could potentially offer you more benefits. However, it's important to consider the potential downsides. Increased complexity is likely, while there's also a chance you may be paying higher fees overall.

Consolidating your tax-wrapped investments with fewer providers could potentially simplify management, reduce costs, and provide a clearer picture of your overall financial situation. Ultimately, the decision should be based on your individual financial goals, preferences, and circumstances. If you're unsure whether this is the right move for you and your financial goals, you can speak to our wealth experts.

If you think an ISA, JISA, LISA or pension transfer is right for you, then don't miss the chance for a cashback boost.

Sources:
1. Fieldwork took place between 9 and 16 January by Opinium on behalf of Nutmeg. The survey was comprised of 1,000 UK investors. Opinium Research is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

Risk warning

As with all investing, your capital is at risk. The value of your investments with Nutmeg can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest. Tax rules vary by individual status and may change. Product rules apply. Before you transfer, check you won’t lose any guarantees or benefits, and that you know what charges you may incur. If you are unsure if a transfer is right for you, please seek financial advice. 

Offer terms and conditions apply. £10,000 minimum transfer. Initiate by 30 May 2025 and keep invested until 30 May 2026. Lifetime ISA transfers via web only. Can't be claimed with any other Nutmeg offer, unless otherwise specified.