In Nutmeg fundamentals part 1 we looked at exploring your investments, creating multiple funds and our monthly investing updates.
Part 2 gets under the cover of the more transactional features of Nutmeg: editing your funds, adding money to them, withdrawing and transferring money between funds.
Edit your funds whenever you want
With Nutmeg you’re not tied to your original investment decisions. Circumstances can always change and with it your investment goals may shift. In turn, you can edit your Nutmeg funds to ensure they stay aligned to your investment plans. That said, you should always remember that investing is a long-term proposition and changing the risk-level on your funds regularly can impact the chances of reaching your investment goals.
To edit a fund, scroll down your portfolio list and click on the fund name to expand it. Then, click ‘See more fund details’. Inside and towards the bottom, you’ll see each of the settings for that fund and a button to edit.
Simple edits, such as changing the name, purpose or target for the fund, will be updated instantly. More involved changes, such as timeframe, contributions, or the risk-level, will impact the investments we make for that fund and how it performs, so we’ll take you to the screen you’re familiar with from setting up the fund where you can see the full impact of any changes you’d like to make – before you make them.
Because there are cost-savings from trading in bulk across our clients (for example, when one of our customers is selling an investment and another buying, we can simply transfer the investment without having to go back out to the market), we currently have fortnightly investing cycles. This means if you were to reduce the risk on your fund, we won’t make the trades to match your fund into the new model immediately; instead, we’ll make them at the next investment cycle. In the meantime, we’ll reflect the new status and mark the fund with an allocation pending flag until the trades are made.
Top up
You can top up your Nutmeg account at any time. Just click on the ‘Top-up / Transfer’ button on the left-hand-side of your Portfolio page.
You can contribute by debit card, in which case we’ll take you to our payment partner Worldpay to complete the transaction online, or bank transfer, where we’ll provide you with the details you need to make a payment direct from your bank or building society.
From the same button you can also transfer money between different funds you’ve set up and withdraw money should you choose to do so.
Transferring money between funds
If you have multiple funds set up with Nutmeg, you can also transfer money between them. Our customers often originally set up just one fund and then later choose to set up another using some of the money they already have with Nutmeg. Select the transfer option from the ‘Top up / Transfer button’. Then select the relevant funds and the amount you want to transfer and confirm when you’re ready.
Remember that we make changes to funds in our fortnightly investment cycles. However, we’ll reflect the transfer amounts right away so you can see the desired status of your Nutmeg account, as well as add a flag to each fund that’s part of the transfer so you can see that the transfer is still in progress.
Selecting withdraw from the ‘Top up / Transfer’ button takes you to a page where you simply input the amount you want to withdraw and the speed with which you want it. In all cases, we’ll immediately show you the amount in a ‘Pending withdrawal’ fund in your portfolio dashboard until the money is paid out to you.
There are a couple of things worth bearing in mind when withdrawing which makes Nutmeg a little different to your bank:
Because your Nutmeg money is actually in the form of investments that you own, we first have to make the order to sell the required amount of investments and the money has to arrive from that sale before we can send it back to you. For standard (free) withdrawals, we’ll process these sales together with the rest of our trading on our next investment cycle (between the 4th-11th and the 18th-25th of each month). If you want it faster, you can select Express or Super Express, which carry a small fee for faster processing.
When investments are sold, the trade takes three days to settle. This means that even on our fastest withdrawal speed, where we process the withdrawal within one business day, there will always be this three-day period before we can send the money back to your account.
Unlike a cash savings account, on any withdrawal, the value of investments can change between the time you request a withdrawal and when the sale is actually made. In particular, this means that were you to withdraw all of the money in a fund by selecting ‘All’, the cash you ultimately receive could be both larger or smaller than the amount you requested, depending on how the market changes in the meantime.
Your ISA allowance each year doesn’t allow you to withdraw and top back up without using part of the allowance. So we make sure that whenever you request a withdrawal, no matter the fund you withdraw from, we’ll use any investments you may have outside your ISA first so the use of your ISA allowance remains intact.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that although you can withdraw money from Nutmeg at any time, sound investing is a long-term proposition and withdrawing will both impact our original projections of the money you may end up with and reduce the chances of reaching your investment goals.
Let us know what you think
I hope that’s given you a flavour of what you can do on the site. But we’re not finished yet – there are many new features and tools in the pipeline. And we’re always looking to improve the site to give our customers what they want, so feel free to send your thoughts and ideas directly to jono@nutmeg.com.
New to Nutmeg? Try us out with no obligation – you can set up a portfolio in minutes.
Why Nutmeg? Well, because we’re easy to use, low cost and transparent. Explore our track record
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Jono Hey
Jono has been responsible for designing and building Nutmeg since it was a PowerPoint deck, and is one of the few Head of UXs to have a PhD. Formerly from the world of physical product design and engineering he spent most of his career switching from making something well to making sure he's making the right thing in the first place. His professional and academic career before Nutmeg includes 7 seven years in the San Francisco Bay Area with Berkeley and Stanford Universities researching and teaching product design, and working at a leading design and strategy consulting firm.Other posts by Jono Hey