What can I do to remedy ISA cash/shares transfer latency?
"One possibility you may consider is to keep all of your funds in the stocks and shares ISA while investing that proportion you wish to keep in cash into a tradeable ""Money Market"" ETF. A Money Market ETF will give you rates comparable to interest rates on cash and at the same time it will give you ""instant access"" subject to normal 3 day settlement of equities.   This is not exactly a perfect solution.  Most Money Market ETFs will pay monthly dividends, so depending on your timing, you may have to give up some interest.  In the worst case, if you were to sell the day before going ex-dividend, then you would be giving up a months interest.  In the best case,  if you were to sell on the day of going ex-dividend, you would be giving up no interest."
While I don't disagree that Wells is trash, it may not be intentional reordering on their part. Some merchants don't settle their machines in a timely manner which can delay an item from posting. So while they were run first, and the funds were probably held in the correct order awaiting posting, the last item CAN clear first due to this. I would reach out to the bank for fee reversals, using the receipts as proof of transaction order. In international transfers there are quite a few charges that come into picture. 1. Your Bank's charges, you mentioned its GBP 20. 2. The Fx conversion margin. So your GBP 317.90 became 500 AUD 3. The Charges of St. George's. Normally it is recovered from Beneficiary. Typically it would show up as 2 entries, one credit for AUD 500 and second a debit. Typically in the range of AUD 10 to 25.   However incaes of return, St George will deduct 2 charges from AUD 500; - The Original Charges for transfer that it would have recovered from Beneficiary. - Additional Return charges, again in the range of AUD 10 to 20. Thus the amount they would have sent back to your Bank would be less than AUD 500. Your Bank would have converted and possibly again charged you a return fee.   Since these are cross border payments there is no regulation and Bank are free to charge as they please and at time do charge excess. What you can do is disptue with the Bank on the points that; - The Beneficiary account was not closed, and its a deficiency of service. - Request for an itemized statement as to what was the amount returned by St George. Your question is actually quite broad, so will try to split it into it's key parts: Yes, standard bank ISAs pay very poor rates of interest at the moment. They are however basically risk free and should track inflation.  Any investment in the 6-7% return range at the moment will be linked to stock. Stock always carries large risks (~50% swings in capital are pretty standard in the short run. In the long run it generally beats every other asset class by miles). If you can’t handle those types of short terms swings, you shouldn’t get involved. If you do want to invest in stock, there is a hefty ignorance tax waiting at every corner in terms of how brokers construct their fees. In a nutshell, there is a different best value broker in the UK for virtually every band of capital, and they make their money through people signing up when they are in range x, and not moving their money when they reach band y; or just having a large marketing budget and screwing you from the start (Nutmeg at ~1% a year is def in this category). There isn't much of an obvious way around this if you are adamant you don't want to learn about it - the way the market is constructed is just a total predatory minefield for the complete novice. There are middle ground style investments between the two extremes you are looking at: bonds, bond funds and mixes of bonds and small amounts of stock (such as the Vanguard income or Conservative Growth funds outlined here), can return more than savings accounts with less risk than stocks, but again its a very diverse field that's hard to give specific advice about without knowing more about what your risk tolerance, timelines and aims are. If you do go down this (or the pure stock fund) route, it will need to be purchased via a broker in an ISA wrapper. The broker charges a platform fee, the fund charges a fund fee. In both cases you want these as low as possible. The Telegraph has a good heat map for the best value ISA platform providers by capital range here. Fund fees are always in the key investor document (KIID), under 'ongoing charges'. I can't comment about your tax liability in Greece. You will have to pay tax on interest in the UK. If you are earning massive amounts of interest, unlikely with the current interest policies from Merv, then you might be bumped up a tier. The receiving bank may ask for proof of the source of the funds, particularly if it is a fair chunk of change. It takes about 4-5 workdays, maybe it depends on the day also when you start the transfer. I transferred an amount last Wednesday, and the same amount on Thursday too. Both transactions hit the destination account on the next Tuesday, with a difference of 2 minutes. "Here's the detailed section of IRS Pub 590 It looks like you intended to have a ""trustee to trustee conversion"", but the receiving trustee dropped their ball.  The bad news is, a ""rollover contribution"" needed to be done in 60 days of the distribution.  There is good news, you can request an extension from the IRS, with one of the reasons if there was an error by one of the financial institutions involved. Other waivers.   If you do not qualify for an automatic waiver, you can apply to the IRS for a waiver of the 60-day rollover requirement. To apply for a waiver, you must submit a request for a letter ruling under the appropriate IRS revenue procedure. This revenue procedure is generally published in the first Internal Revenue Bulletin of the year. You must also pay a user fee with the application. The information is in Revenue Procedure 2016-8 in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2016-1 available at www.irs.gov/irb/2016-01_IRB/ar14.html.    In determining whether to grant a waiver, the IRS will consider all relevant facts and circumstances, including: Whether errors were made by the financial institution (other than      those described under Automatic waiver , earlier); Whether you were unable to complete the rollover due to death, disability, hospitalization, incarceration, restrictions imposed by a      foreign country, or postal error; Whether you used the amount distributed (for example, in the case of payment by check, whether you cashed the check); and How much time has passed since the date of distribution. You can also see if you can get ETrade to ""recharacterize"" the equity position to your desired target IRA.  The positive here is that the allowed decision window for calendar year 2016 rollovers is October 15 2017; the negatives are this is irrevocable, and restricts certain distributions from the target for a year (unlikely to impact your situation, but, you know, ""trust but verify"" anonymous internet advice); and it requires ETrade to recognize the original transaction was a rollover to a Roth IRA, which they currently don't.  But if their system lets them put it through you could end up with the amount in a traditional IRA with no other taxable events to report, which appears to be your goal.   Recharacterization FAQ" The person you're talking to is probably someone in the company. They need to convey the message to their bank. So you need to explain it to them as if they were 3 year old kids. You may be used to SWIFT transactions because that's how you always get paid, but unless the UK firm regularly employes Russian freelancers, this is probably the first time ever they have heard of it. Similarly, someone in the local branch of their community bank has probably never heard of it before either. In Europe they use IBANs and SWIFTs are rather uncommon. Be patient, explain the issue and the solution in as many words as you can, and suggest them putting you on speaker at the bank so that you could talk directly to the person executing the transaction. If you do the same on your side and let the bankers talk directly to each other - that would probably be ideal. As per the SIPC website: Most customers can expect to receive their property in one to three   months. When the records of the brokerage firm are accurate,   deliveries of some securities and cash to customers may begin shortly   after the trustee receives the completed claim forms from customers,   or even earlier if the trustee can transfer customer accounts to   another broker-dealer. Delays of several months usually arise when the   failed brokerage firm’s records are not accurate. It also is not   uncommon for delays to take place when the troubled brokerage firm or   its principals were involved in fraud. Source link: http://www.sipc.org/Who/SIPCQuestions/SIPCQuestion3.aspx Brokerage firms must settle funds promptly, but there's no explicit definition for this in U.S. federal law. See for example, this article on settling trades in three days. Wikipedia also has a good write-up on T+3. It is common practice, however. It takes approximately three days for the funds to be available to me, in my Canadian brokerage account. That said, the software itself prevents me from using funds which are not available, and I'm rather surprised yours does not. You want to be careful not to be labelled a pattern day trader, if that is not your intention. Others can better fill you in on the consequences of this. I believe it will not apply to you unless you are using a margin account. All but certainly, the terms of service that you agreed to with this brokerage will specify the conditions under which they can lock you out of your account, and when they can charge interest. If they are selling your stock at times you have not authorised (via explicit instruction or via a stop-loss order), you should file a complaint with the S.E.C. and with sufficient documentation. You will need to ensure your cancel-stop-loss order actually went through, though, and the stock was sold anyway. It could simply be that it takes a full business day to cancel such an order. An ISA is a much simpler thing than I suspect you think it is. It is a wrapper or envelope, and the point of it is that HMRC does not care what happens inside the envelope, or even about extractions of funds from the envelope; they only care about insertions of funds into the envelope. It is these insertions that are limited to £15k in a tax year; what happens to the funds once they're inside the envelope is your own business.  Some diagrams: Initial investment of £10k. This is an insertion into the envelope and so counts against your £15k/tax year limit.                 +---------ISA-------+ ----- £10k --------->              |                +-------------------+  So now you have this:                 +---------ISA-------+                |  £10k of cash     |                +-------------------+  Buy fund:                 +---------ISA-------+                |    £10k of ABC    |                +-------------------+  Fund appreciates. This happens inside the envelope; HMRC don't care:                 +---------ISA-------+                |    £12k of ABC    |                +-------------------+  Sell fund. This happens inside the envelope; HMRC don't care:                 +---------ISA-------+                |    £12k of cash   |                +-------------------+  Buy another fund. This happens inside the envelope; HMRC don't care:                 +---------ISA-----------------+                | £10k of JKL & £2k of cash   |                +-----------------------------+  Fund appreciates. This happens inside the envelope; HMRC don't care:                 +---------ISA-----------------+                | £11k of JKL & £2k of cash   |                +-----------------------------+  Sell fund. This happens inside the envelope; HMRC don't care:                 +---------ISA-------+                |    £13k of cash   |                +-------------------+  Withdraw funds. This is an extraction from the envelope; HMRC don't care.                 +---------ISA-------+ <---- £13k ---------               |                +-------------------+  No capital gains liability, you don't even have to put this on your tax return (if applicable) - your £10k became £13k inside an ISA envelope, so HMRC don't care. Note however that for the rest of that tax year, the most you can insert into an ISA would now be £5k:                 +---------ISA-------+ ----- £5k --------->               |                +-------------------+  even though the ISA is empty. This is because the limit is to the total inserted during the year. "Your bank Lloyds sent the Australian bank $500 AUD, having converted $317.90 GBP at a rate of 1.5728 AUD per GBP which was slightly less than the published rate which normally applies to transfers measured in hundred thousands if not  millions of pounds.  Using the published rate amounts to an unstated fee of 11 AUD which you are not complaining about.  You also paid a fee to Lloyds of 20 GBP which you disclosed after I had posted this answer. The Australian bank refused to accept the payment because the account to which the money had to be deposited was closed.  Perhaps, instead of just sending back $500 AUD, it converted the amount to GBP (less its fee of what I suspect is $60 AUD) and sent it back.  Notice that the bank rate of 1.592 AUD per GBP says that 276.58 GBP is what you get from a tad over  $440 AUD, and so perhaps St George's charged you a $60 AUD fee for the conversion while converting the rest ($440 AUD) to GBP. Or maybe Lloyds  got $500 AUD from St Georges and charged you a $60 AUD fee for converting it to GBP. Regardless of who did the  conversion, it is also possible that the rate you got (not  quite as good as the published rate) corresponds to $450 AUD converting to 276.58 GBP and a $50 AUD fee for the conversion.   You said I was told by Lloyds TSB that St. Georges wouldn't levy any charges, as they would be paid a separate ""agent's fee"". This might have been told to you as ""St. Georges will not be levying any charges if you send $500 AUD for deposit to the account in Australia and your payee will get exactly $500 AUD if you pay us 317.90 GBP plus 20 GBP as our conversion fee today. If you want to send GBP instead, we cannot tell you how much to send  because St. George's will levy a charge for conversion to AUD, and the conversion will be at the rate then prevailing. So your payee may receive more or less than $500 AUD."" Perhaps, wanting to send exactly $500 AUD, you chose to pay Lloyds TSB and send AUD. But, since the account was closed, the money came back, and so you ended up paying yet another conversion fee. The questions are, who charged the second fee? As Muro said in a comment, it should be listed somewhere on the itemized statement. and is it a reasonable charge? I think $50 or $60 AUD is excessive but, then, I am not a bank, and maybe that is what their standard (minimum) charge is. As I said in my comment, the charge is usually a percentage of the amount transferred subject to a minimum levy that the bank sets." You're overthinking it. The ISA limit applies to the amount you invest into the ISA. In your example, £10,000. Whether that then fluctuates with performance is irrelevant. Even if you realise aprofit or a loss, nobody is watching it. You merely count the amount you originally contributed into the ISA wrapper. When they add up to £15,000; that's the limit reached. (And by the way, remember that only money going into the ISA is counted. It doesn't matter if you -let's say - put £15k in, then remove 10k. You've reached the limit. You don't again have the chance to put £10k 'back in'. The reason it's not automatic is that Questrade doesn't want to force you to convert in margin accounts at the time of buying the stock. What if you bought a US stock today and the exchange rate happened to be very unfavorable (due to whatever), wouldn't you rather wait a few days to exchange the funds rather than lose on conversion right away? In my opinion, Questrade is doing you a favor by letting you convert at your own convenience. You can't actually transfer shares directly unless they were obtained as part of an employee share scheme - see the answers to questions 19 and 20 on this page: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/isa/faqs.htm#19 Q. Can I put shares from my employee share scheme into my ISA? A. You can transfer any shares you get from into a stocks and shares component of an ISA without having to pay   Capital Gains Tax - provided your ISA manager agrees to take them. The   value of the shares at the date of transfer counts towards the annual   limit. This means you can transfer up to £11,520 worth of shares in the tax   year 2013-14 (assuming that you make no other subscriptions to ISAs,   in those years). You must transfer the shares within 90 days from the day they cease to   be subject to the Plan, or (for approved SAYE share option schemes) 90   days of the exercise of option date. Your employer should be able to   tell you more. Q. Can I put windfall or inherited shares in my ISA? A. No. You can only transfer shares you own into an ISA if they have   come from an employee share scheme. Otherwise, the ISA manager must   purchase shares on the open market. The situation is the same if you have shares that you have inherited.   You are not able to transfer them into an ISA. One option is buying physical gold.  I don't know about Irish law -- but from an economic standpoint, putting funds in foreign currencies would also be an option. You could look into buying shares in an ETF tracking foreign currency as an alternative to direct money exchange.