2017 is now clearly with us, but what does that mean for your pensions? In particular how will your pension charges be affected for the coming year?
The fact is this. If you change nothing, then nothing changes. Your pension provider is not about to drop you a nice letter and explain your charges have just been reduced and to thank you for the business.
Reality – with pension charges as low as 2% you’ll be losing 20% of your fund every ten years, plus you adviser charge which may well be as high as another 2%. Forty percent (that’s 40%) of your fund potentially going in charges every 10 years.
Let me tell you the truth about your plan with a fixed price review. It’s a one off cost, I’ll review your plans and provide a full written report about how much you pay in charges, how it’s peformed over years and what you can do next. Fixed Price Pension Review.
Pension Planning – the old charges conundrum.
Remember when your Nan told you -’you only get what you pay for’ and that has stuck with you for life, honestly it’s true. Only now in 2013 things are even more complex than that.
Information is everywhere, we have comparison sites telling us what the best buy is on everything, and if that is not enough we have Which magazine, every month that tells us what is the best buy.
[box] You can’t get your Pension Charges to Nil – but you can get darn close.[/box]
Which have a massive team of independent experts reviewing everything from TV’s to electricity prices. Nothing is a simple as your Nan made out any more,
There never was the facility for her to buy from a supplier in the USA across the internet, nor were there a choice of 200 or so Fridge Freezers, and now with the comparison websites you have 20 firms comparing the 200 Fridges. No wonder everyone feels over loaded. Picking up a copy of Which will allow you to make a decision in an instant. Which know this.
The same applies to Pensions – you only get what you pay for, which is not true. Many of the lowest charging providers have incredibly good plans. But you need to be exerting choice over your investment funds, that means you need to have some knowledge about investments. Only you don’t.
The human animal has only been able to get access to pension since the 1960’s or so, and before then it was never an option to evolve and understand, it is just not possible to learn how to make investment decisions in 50 years as a species. It was nearly a million years before we left the sea for the first time, remember. As humans we still hiccup, something that Fish also do, some kind of stuck process inside our genetic makeup.
To get your own copy of the Pension Charges Calculator –
With that level of time to change it’s clear that being expected to manage your own pensions is not going to be learned anytime soon, and given the level of complexity one could argue that your choices are not going to be easy.
That said, one of the things you can take immediate control of is your Pension charges, these are directly comparable from one provider to another and all you are then left to do is manage your investments.
Given that Ape’s using pins to select investments seem to be outperforming investment fund managers I don’t think this is going to be a difficult exercise to learn.
Our one day training courses will teach you much of what you need to know, get in touch with us below and we will let you know the next time they are running.