Withdrawable funds are the amount of money you are able to withdraw out of your EasyEquities account into your bank account or use to purchase a gift voucher.
Where for example, your EasyEquities account indicates that you have $500 worth of 'withdrawable funds', it means that you have $500 in your account that is not subject to any of the lock-ups we sometimes need to apply to client funds. These lock-ups include:
1. Unsettled funds - when you sell a holding, it takes 5 working/business days for the funds to be settled. Until those 5 days have elapsed you cannot withdraw them. Using our early settlement will shorten the settlement period to 1 day.
2. Locked funds - when you contribute funds to your EasyEquities account by way of a debit order or EFT, we lock-up up those funds for a period of time. The time periods for these locked funds periods are below
- EFT deposit - 14 days
- Debit order deposit - 40 days
- Interaccount transfer - 40 days
- Promotional vouchers - 3 years (not applicable to vouchers you purchase and send on EasyEquities)
These rules regarding withdrawable funds are contained in our EasyEquities Terms & Conditions.
It is important to note that some of these protections are put in place to protect the health and longevity of the business and as importantly with that, our clients and their holdings. If we allow ourselves to be defrauded due to sub-par business practices, the effects on you the user could require unnecessary changes like increased costs, less variety of choice/functionality and an altogether less Easy experience.
Sufficient holdings to cover my withdrawal
This is best explained by way of example:
An Investor has an EasyEquities portfolio worth $1500 and no available cash. In order to buy a gift voucher for $1,000, she needs withdrawable funds to do so.
She does an EFT into her EasyEquities account for $100 on a Tuesday and the funds are allocated to her account.
In order to determine whether the $100 is 'withdrawable' (and can, therefore, be used for the gift voucher purchase) our system looks at her holdings and determines that she has $1500 of holdings, which is more than sufficient to cover the $100 she wishes to use.
The system marks the $100 as 'withdrawable' and the client buys the voucher and sends it to her very happy nephew for his birthday.
Two days later (Thursday) the client needs to withdraw the $1500, so she sells her entire holdings and uses early settlement to settle the funds a day later (Friday).
The system, however, would only mark $1400 of the $1500 as 'withdrawable funds', and it would continue to hold the $100 as protection until 14 days from the date her original $100 was allocated, have elapsed.
In this example, the client is able to withdraw her $1400 of 'withdrawable' funds on Friday but would need to wait a further 11 days until the remaining $100 is unlocked and becomes 'withdrawable' at which point she can withdraw it to her bank account.