In two days ? No . <| sep |> Amazing . And I just remembered . Who can forget THE SNAKE SPEECH <| sep |> From a high level perspective unless you save more than 15 k a year then there is no difference between an ISA and another savings account . You put money in it and earn interest . Some of them require you to commit to leave the money for a time period if you take the money out earlier than this you pay a penalty . The difference is that they allow you to not have to pay tax on the interest . If the ISA offered 5 % AER and you had 100 in it for a year you would earn 5 in interest . Until this year in a normal savings account a basic rate taxpayer would only get 4 because they would have to pay 20 % tax . Higher rate tax payers would only get 3 . From April passed you can earn 1000 in interest 500 for higher rate tax pagers tax free . Cash ISAs normally have slightly lower interest rates than normal savings accounts . Because of the new tax free interest allowance they only make sense for people that aim to get a lot of money saved long term . If you were getting 5 % interest and in the current market it ' s more likely you ' ll get 0 . 5 % then a basic rate tax payer would have to have 20 , 000 saved before an ISA saved them Any tax . On 0 . 5 % you ' d need 200 , 000 . The problem with not having the ISA is you lose the allowance . If you can save 15 k per year then in 10 years you can have 150 k compound interest in the tax free wrapper . If you saved it in a normal savings account you might make more interest but when you get to 150 k you will probably have started having to pay tax on interest and you can only put 15 k into the ISA .