Child Trust Fund Top Ups

Child Trust Funds are no longer available to open.

We no longer accept transfers into our Child Trust Fund.

Yes. The maximum you can top up for the current tax year is £9,000.

If you want to pay in more than £9,000 per year, our Child Tax Exempt Savings Plan can be taken out as well as a Child Trust Fund to further maximise the child’s savings.

No. The Child Trust Fund is designed to offer a financial head start when the child becomes an adult by providing a cash payment when they turn 18 years old. Only in exceptional circumstances can they get their hands on the money. There are further details within the plan conditions which you will have received when you opened the Child Trust Fund.  If you have misplaced these, please call us on 0800 988 2418 and we will answer any questions you may have.

When your child turns 18 they’ll get back at least everything you’ve paid in, plus any annual bonuses that may have been added. That’s our guarantee to you.

No, the only person who can access the money in the Child Trust Fund is your child. And even then it’s locked away until they’re 18.

You control the Child Trust Fund until your child reaches 16. From 16 onwards, your child can control the Child Trust Fund if they wish to.

The money you pay into the Child Trust Fund is invested in Foresters Friendly Society’s With Profits Fund (WPF). We never forget it’s your child’s money, so we take extra good care of it. The money is spread across a number of different types of assets that may include property, UK government bonds, equities and cash. If the return from any one particular asset type is poor, the investment may be protected from the full impact of this fall as other assets may perform better.

Many funds that invest in a variety of asset classes would have a mixture of equities and bonds.  These asset classes traditionally have a negative correlation, meaning that if equities go up in value, bonds generally go down in value.  The opposite happens when equities go down in value.  Over the past few years this correlation has moved to a positive correlation, resulting in equity and bond valuations moving in the same direction.  This can increase the risk of poor returns and increased volatility in fund values.

We use private assets to help diversify our fund and reduce its overall risk, as private assets are not so closely correlated with equity and bond (public) investments and so can help to balance investment volatility.  Private assets also offer the potential for higher returns as they are often long term investments.  The downside is that private assets offer lower flexibility than public assets. We monitor the overall exposure between private and public assets to ensure the mix meets our expected cashflows.

The Child Trust Fund does not pay interest. Instead, by investing the money you pay into the plan into our With Profits Fund we provide the potential for growth by way of bonuses. The better the fund does, the higher the bonuses your child could potentially receive. Any profits generated by our fund are used to add an annual bonus and possibly a final bonus when the plan reaches the end of its term.

We have paid annual bonuses on our Child Trust Fund for the past 15 years and although we can’t guarantee that we’ll pay a bonus every year in the future, we can guarantee that your child will get back what has been paid in plus any previous annual bonuses that have been added to the plan.

• In 2024 the annual bonus rate was 2.25%

The annual bonus is applied to the amount you have invested in your child’s Child Trust Fund to date plus any previous annual bonuses that have been added.

The addition of any bonus is not guaranteed. To find out more about the addition of bonuses and how we manage our fund please read our Principles and Practices of Financial Management (PPFM).