According to the insurer, LV= the UK worker will change jobs every five years on average. Assuming you have a new pension for every job, the average 40-year-old will have accumulated five Pensions. Below are the top three reasons why you should review your existing Pension Contacts.
The first few pensions they will have taken out will date back to the 1990s when charges were astronomical compared to today’s market. Typically, you would be paying around 1.5% annual management charge (AMC) plus around £2-£3 pm policy fee, and have initial units, relating to the first two years’ premiums with even higher charges associated with them.
Charges came down in April 2001 with the introduction of Stakeholder pensions. With AMC capped at 1%, this was changed to 1.5% in April 2005.
However, the introduction of Workplace Pensions has made the market even more competitive, with AMCs below 0.5% for those with larger funds.
Another reason you might have high charges is if you are in a SIPP. A SIPP is a Self-Invested Pension Plan. They allow you to invest in direct shareholdings, use the services of a Discretionary Fund Manager or purchase commercial property. SIPPs usually have higher charges than a Personal Pension (PPP) or Stakeholder Pension (SHP) to reflect the fact that they are more sophisticated. However, I see far too many clients who have a SIPP and are invested in collective funds that can be accessed far more cheaply in a PPP or SHP.
Another common reason for underperformance is the myriad of pension providers that have been taken over and closed their funds to new business. A closed fund has little incentive to outperform the market as they are not trying to attract new money. They are very unlikely to have a star manager with an outstanding track record. In addition, it has to fund new purchases from selling other holdings as there is no cash coming into the fund. This will make it a bit sluggish to respond to opportunities in the market.
You should also review any pensions which have ‘life styling’. This was the standard practice on employer-sponsored pensions. “Life styling” automatically started dis-investing your pension funds the nearer you got to retirement. It did this in order to end up fully invested in gilts at your retirement age. This is because annuity rates are based on gilt yields, and so by investing in gilts, you were protecting yourself from stock market falls and locking into annuity rates. However, with the popularity of Flexi Access Drawdown, many clients are now staying invested for 20 or 30 years beyond retirement, and so need some stock market exposure to get the best out of their pension funds, albeit at a lower level than when they were working.
Even if you are contributing at a good rate into a current scheme, and know that you are funding at the correct level in order to fund the retirement income you desire, or if you are contributing the most you can afford and can’t put any more into a pension. These three reasons should demonstrate that you still need to review what you already have.
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