The Financial Times suggest there are scores of individuals out there who have over £1 million in tax sheltered holdings. What is perhaps even more surprising is the fact that they report a number of individuals who have as much as £12 million in these type of accounts. It must be said that this is the exception as most investors have less than £100k in an ISA, however these findings provide evidence of just how lucrative these types of vehicles can be.

It goes without saying that if one had put the maximum into just the cash component of an ISA that they would not achieve anything close to a million. Rather the earnings have come from those who have been very prudent about choosing the right stocks that have yielded some significant gains over the years. According to the FT’s calculations in order to achieve £1 million, an individual would have had to earn around 12.5% per annum since 1987 by no means an easy feat.

Interestingly, there has recently been a large amount of media coverage around the reality of interest rates for savers. Recent reports by Which suggest that savers are losing around £12 billion a year in lost interest. In a scan of the majority of UK based savings accounts they found that almost 600 accounts pay an annual interest rate of 0.5% or less on a balance of £5,000. Worse still about 25% of the total savings accounts pay 0.1% or less.

The contrast between the ISA winners and saver losers is stark and really does show that a disparity does exist.