Buying more shares

[frankieboy]

Now that the SAYE share scheme has now finished what's the easiest and best way to buy more shares, thinking of using the extra money now to buy more shares to top up my pension.

[RobertT]

The easiest is probably via Equiniti which will mean keeping all your RM shares under one roof. But they’re almost certainly not going to be the cheapest.

I suggest you do a bit of Googling to find stockbrokers and equity ISA providers that you’re happy with – their charges will vary quite a lot!

Buying in relatively large quantities is probably the way to go to cut the costs. This will give you some idea:

[toomuchcoke]

Now that the SAYE share scheme has now finished what's the easiest and best way to buy more shares, thinking of using the extra money now to buy more shares to top up my pension.

The cheapest stockbroker I'm aware of is the Halifax. Not their normal charges (which are about average), but they do offer a service called ShareBuilder where you schedule your purchases in advance on given days (along with a direct debit beforehand) and get a commission of £2. Given the normal advice of "Keep your purchase costs below 1%" and allowing for Stamp Duty at 0.5% that means you need to be funding things to the tune of at least £404. ShareBuilder by default automatically reinvests your dividends in more shares of the company that they came from, however given commission charges of 2% I'd turn that off if I where you! You can specify the purchases (& direct debit) to occur every month, or as one offs. (Sale commissions are treated as a normal sale and cost you, IIRC, £12.50.)

ShareBuilder also has the peculiarity that it uses all the money you provide, minus that taken in commission and stamp duty, to buy shares in whatever company you specified which means you end up owning fractional shares down to 6 decimal places! (I have a small amount of Royal Mail shares with them set to reinvest the dividends, so yesterday's dividend got me 1.335149 more shares.)