Pension fund performance - do you monitor yours, how is it doing, do you actively change it?
- Thread starter danlightbulb
- Start date
I'm ashamed to admit that over the years, life has got in the way of me doing anything more than just paying as much as I could afford into the default company one, which let's be honest, was not a lot. But....I've done that now for nearly 20 years so at least I have paid some in.
However... I need pension advice.
I don't confidently know how many different pensions I have.
I've been through company mergers, tupe, redundancy, companies that updated/changed their pension providers and some stuff in between. Consequently, I need to start from scratch and track all the ones I have to my name down. Questions;
1: Is it possible to have 2 or 3 different pensions/pots with the same provider? So for example say standard life. If I worked for a company from say 2005-2010 and it was standard life, then another company 2015-2020 and it was standard life, will that be two different products I assume?
2: I have NEVER consolidated any of my old pensions no matter how small/big. I was once advised by my old man to never consolidate as you lose out. I think this is old/out of date advice and not necessarily the case?
3: How does one track down without question, ALL pensions under my name? i.e. guaranteed that by the end of the process, I will have a list of everything.
If you're referring to mine...then as a first go it was a bit messy. Second time around I will tidy it up and try to improve the functionality.
But essentially I first compiled a list of all the funds like this from the factsheets. This was laborious, and I was hoping data would be available somehow to download rather than having to manually open PDF factsheets:
Then I analysed the breakdown of the funds I had and the ones I was interested in like this. Couldn't do this for every fund, would have taken ages.
Once I'd figured out what split I was looking for, I manually tried different fund percentages of different funds until I arrived at the split I wanted.
Also checking out the fees at the same time. Some of the best performing funds had high fees too and I didn't know how to work out if that was worth it or not.
I'm looking at mine at the moment as well. Be interested in anyone's views on St James Place, or Fisher Investments.
St James seems to have an awful lot of stock duplication within the funds while Fisher seems to take a bit more of an active role. Early days though, also getting an IFA involved but who knows how independent these guys really are.
St James seems to have an awful lot of stock duplication within the funds while Fisher seems to take a bit more of an active role. Early days though, also getting an IFA involved but who knows how independent these guys really are.
Associate
I though St James Place was notoriously expensive (?)
Aegon. There are 80+ funds overall that I can pick from, but a lot of them look similar just different mixes of equities in them.
Im over six figures now so its important. I put in £10k a year now with my employer contribution plus my own, and I have about 25 years left.
Soldato
I'd look into increasing that contribution.
edit: to be tax efficient, and get a pot big enough for the lifestyle you expect.
edit: to be tax efficient, and get a pot big enough for the lifestyle you expect.
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I cant, I already put 12% and can't afford more than that yet. Ive been increasing my contribution every year with part of my pay rise.
Good at managing their fees mostly though.
Do they not offer any over the top service? I chose a "path" and then it dynamically allocates and moves stuff around based on target retirement.
I've done 18% since August 2020 which is just anecdotal but certainly smashes 2% yoy.
2% per annum over 16 years which was almost all a bull run following the 2007 crash is impressively bad. Even the FTSE100 has a total return of like 6% a year in that timeframe.
Makes you wonder what these people are being paid for?
Makes you wonder what these people are being paid for?
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Good thread to highlight as never paid much attention to this until very recently. Shocked at how poor mine has been performing and started to consolidate it via Vanguard SIPP and seeing what to change my current employee pension to for a better return hopefully whilst a long way from retiring.
Not in my 20’s and really only in my mid 30’s I started to actually care though I was always contributing. Just today I upped it from 8 to 11% and will need to start making lump sum contributions at end of the financial year to avoid it being taxed away.
There is only the lifestyle fund which starts off as 70/30 equities/bonds then as you reach 10 years from retirement it starts moving more into bonds, then 5 years out it starts transferring to cash. The equities fund they use for this is the AGN BLK 50/50 Glob Eq Idx (BLK), which as I understand it is 50% UK equities and 50% global.
So as that mix isn't what I think is best, those lifestyle options are no good for me.
Here is the factsheet for the AGN BLK 50/50 Glob Eq Idx (BLK).
Obviously the last 5 years has been extremely volatile, so that performance data is all over the place. But, the fund has tracked its benchmark, which is what it's supposed to do I guess.
Obviously the last 5 years has been extremely volatile, so that performance data is all over the place. But, the fund has tracked its benchmark, which is what it's supposed to do I guess.
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Soldato
That sounds awful tbh.
Would this be a lump sum before the tax year ends 5th April 202x every year into your private SIPP and then you'd claim back the additional rate in the tax return subsequently before the following 31st Jan?
Would it still be the same as upping your own % via work's pension for it not to be taxed away?