Help! My £450,000 Isa is missing

For the past 25 years I’ve had a stocks and shares Isa with the investment platform Bestinvest but I recently felt that its service had deteriorated so I decided to transfer my investments, worth about £450,000, to AJ Bell.

I sent the forms on November 14 but two months have gone and my transfer still isn’t complete. AJ Bell tells me that it chases Bestinvest every two weeks but hasn’t had a reply, while Bestinvest tells me it hasn’t had any emails from AJ Bell.

I have called both companies several times but I don’t know what’s going on. I’m finding this frustrating and stressful and I’m not sure what else I can do.
Jan Doskar, Surrey

Katherine replies

You wanted to transfer the 50 assets you held with Bestinvest. This meant that Bestinvest had to complete 50 transfer forms to re-register the units or shares in AJ Bell’s name. According to AJ Bell, you had an unusually large number — its customers have fewer than five holdings on average.

Bestinvest told me that a standard “in-specie” transfer, where you transfer an asset or holding, rather than the cash value of that asset after selling it, usually takes between four to eight weeks, while AJ Bell said it normally takes six to eight weeks, although you were still waiting after ten. I thought it was interesting that both companies’ timescales exceeded the 30-day deadline set out by the financial regulator.

The companies blamed each other for the delay. AJ Bell said Bestinvest had refused an electronic transfer, meaning the paperwork was sent by post, while Bestinvest said AJ Bell had been slow to send the documents it needed. They also blamed the time of year because there were fewer people working over the festive period, although you pointed out that if they had met the regulator’s 30-day deadline, your transfer would have been completed before Christmas.

Your investments were finally transferred on January 24 but some of your dividends were still being paid to Bestinvest. This is normal — it only meant that the shares hadn’t been registered in AJ Bell’s name at the point the dividends were paid. Bestinvest said it would keep your account open for six months to make sure any residual payments were sent to AJ Bell. When you checked in March you noticed that two dividend payments of £170 were still in your Bestinvest account. I asked the company what was going on and it said it had to manually transfer the dividends but this has now been sorted.

Your investments had increased in value since November so you had not lost out financially during the delay, but I thought both companies should pay you compensation, at least for the poor communication which left you chasing for weeks on end.

AJ Bell said some things were out of its control but accepted that it could have made the process smoother and agreed to pay you £250. Bestinvest offered you £75, which you said was insulting given the amount of time and stress this had caused you. I thought it was equally to blame for your problem so I asked Bestinvest if it would match AJ Bell’s offer, but it wouldn’t.

You were frustrated by how time-consuming this process had been and thanked me for making it more bearable.

• Best stocks and shares Isas
• Two vans, one DVLA record. Has my son’s van been cloned?

Beans, broccoli, beans again … the Morrisons till has charged me twice

On June 10 last year my wife and I were doing our weekly shop at Morrisons in Crowborough and had nearly finished scanning on the self-service till when the screen suddenly asked for payment. It wouldn’t let us scan the last few items and we struggled to find staff to help us, so we decided to pay and then scan the remaining items separately. But after paying with my HSBC debit card, the till crashed and had to be restarted.

It was unclear whether the money had been taken from my account so we scanned everything again and paid the full amount of £216.66. When I got home, I checked my bank account and noticed that the first transaction, of £204.87, had been taken. I went back to the store the next day and reported this to the duty manager but I was told to speak to my bank.

I raised a chargeback claim with HSBC, which refunded the £204.87, and I thought the matter had been resolved. So I was then surprised to get a letter from HSBC six months later in January saying that Morrisons had supplied evidence to prove that I had paid in store, using my PIN to verify the purchase, and that goods had been exchanged for the payment, so the £204.87 was taken from my account again.

I complained to Morrisons and provided a copy of my bank statement showing the two transactions within ten minutes of each other, but Morrisons now says it has no information about the payments.

I am £204.87 down and feel I have been treated very badly.
Mark Harris, Kent

Katherine replies

You had paid for your shopping twice because of a problem with a Morrisons till yet it passed the buck to your bank. If you dispute a transaction, you can raise a chargeback claim with your payment card company to reverse the payment. It’s not unusual for a bank to reimburse a chargeback claim immediately, but if the retailer then says the payment was legitimate, it can then claw the money back, which is what happened to you.

When HSBC charged you again, it was acting on information from Morrisons, so really it was the responsibility of the supermarket to sort it out. But Morrisons said it couldn’t locate your payments, which was odd considering it had found details about that first transaction when disputing your chargeback claim. This didn’t make much sense, but I couldn’t get a clear answer from Morrisons about what had gone wrong.

It was evident from your bank statement that you had made two similar, consecutive transactions and it wasn’t your fault that the company had no record in its system. Morrisons, whose systems are evidently not the fastest, eventually agreed to reimburse you. It said: “We would like to apologise for the inconvenience and we have been in touch to offer the refund.”

• Tesco, Asda, Lidl and Sainsbury’s loyalty cards compared

I do take this woman … but I don’t want a massive tax bill

My partner and I live near each other but in separate houses, without any financial interest in each other’s home. We plan to get married but want to continue living separately. But at some point we might want to sell one property and move in together.

We would like to know the implications for capital gains tax if one of us decides to sell after we get married. Our reading of the rules is that married couples and civil partners can only count one property as their main home at any one time. If the tax is payable, what date would the capital gain be calculated from — the date of purchase or the date of the marriage?

Both properties have been used only as our homes and we have never rented them out.
Thomas Robinson, address supplied

Katherine replies

The answer to your question might also prove useful to a certain Labour MP (ahem, Angela Rayner), who has been embroiled in a dispute about whether her house or her husband’s was her main residence before she sold her property in 2015.

According to the tax rules, married couples or civil partners are treated as one unit, but unmarried couples are seen as individuals. As long as you are not married both of your homes would be exempt from capital gains tax, but this would change once you tied the knot.

Stefanie Tremain from the accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg said spouses and civil partners can only have one main residence, regardless of whether they are living together or not. She said that if you got married but continued to live separately, you and your wife would need to jointly nominate one property as your main home. If you don’t do this within two years HM Revenue & Customs will decide which is the main home by looking at a number of factors, such as council tax, bank statements and which address is on the electoral roll.

According to Tremain, it is acceptable to nominate the house that could save you the most tax. Capital gains tax is calculated by deducting the purchase price from the amount you sold it for, with tax levied at a rate of up to 24 per cent on the profit. You can deduct the costs involved in buying, selling and improving the property.

You told me that your house has gone up £300,000 since you bought it in 1999, whereas your partner’s house has increased £425,000 since 2007, so it might make the most sense to nominate your partner’s home as your main residence.

Tremain said the tax would be worked out as a percentage of the total profits during your ownership of the property after you were married. So say you got married in 2026 then sold your house in 2029, you would have owned it for 30 years and been married for three of those, meaning 10 per cent of the profit would be taxed.

It may make sense to sell one property before you tie the knot so you don’t have to worry about paying capital gains at all. Or if you decide to keep both houses, make sure you nominate one within two years of marriage — it could save you thousands.

Can we help you?

Email [email protected] or write to Question of Money, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. Please send only copies of original documents. Letters should be exclusive to The Sunday Times. Advice is offered without legal responsibility and we regret that we cannot reply to everyone who contacts us.

Jill Insley is away