Digging in to the 5,000 Avios offer
Nutmeg, the investment platform, are no stranger to giving Avios to new customers. This offer is a little different, as it spans all of their financial products, and it’s a fixed amount of 5,000 points rather than the previous offers that have been tiered.
An important disclaimer
As you may have guessed, I’m a points fanatic not a financial advisor. This isn’t financial advice, and investments can absolutely go down as well as up. That’s a critical point as Nutmeg does not offer fixed savings accounts (i.e. you just earn interest on your savings, with zero risk). Instead, they’re focused on products like pensions and ISAs that contain investments where there is risk.
Who are Nutmeg
They were one of the first new-wave investment websites launching back in the early 2010s. They’re now a substantial size with over 200,000 customers in the UK. The website was bought by JPMorgan Chase back in 2021.
What’s the Nutmeg Avios offer?
If you are a new customer, you open an account via this specific link and invest at least £500 in a single payment, then within 55 days you will get 5,000 Avios. Those 5k Avios are worth £50.
Nutmeg’s products include:
- Pensions
- Lifetime ISA
- Stocks and shares ISA
- Junior ISA
And they offer a number of “investment styles” which will dictate how they decide to invest your money.
Is this a good offer?
Not really, except in specific circumstances.
- If you’re already planning to open an account with Nutmeg and invest at least £500
- You’re shopping around for a provider and Nutmeg is on your shortlist
- If you really need 5,000 Avios, have £500 to invest (and risk) and you’re willing to wait 55 days for the points.
At the time of writing, Nutmeg have an active offer with TopCashBack. You’ll earn £75 in cash, within 120 days, if you open an ISA account, invest £500 and commit to a £100 a month direct debit. The cashback increases to £100 if you open a pension and deposit at least £5,000.
The Avios on offer (5,000) is in line with other financial services companies. Right now, Scottish Friendly is offering 5,500 Avios if you open a Junior ISA or the same number of Avios if you open their Moneybuilder Select account.
The challenge with trying to leverage this offer to get your hands on 5k of points is that you could end up losing money in your investments, and as much as Nutmeg make it easy to open an account, it’s still an effort to do so.
Switching your home, car or pet insurance is a better source of points. Right now, you could earn up to 4,000 Avios just for doing that (GoCompare, Car Insurance), and you’ll likely have to renew one or more insurances each year, so it’s a required purchase rather than an additional one.
What if you need Avios points quickly?
It can be tempting to take up an offer like this if you just need a few thousand Avios points to hit a goal. The reality is that most offers, especially those via the Avios Shopping portal, will. not deliver points immediately. It can be tens, or even hundreds, of days before they hit your account.
With the Shopping portal, you may not earn points at all, although that is rare (but it does happen).
If you need points quickly, I wrote a guide. The reality is that the fastest way to get points is to buy them, either directly as a purchase or the more efficient approach of boosting the points you have previously earned. Boosting costs 0.92p a point, which means the 5,000 you would have earned from Nutmeg would cost you £46.
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