Best Pension?

bengee1977

Hi,

What's the best method to use when deciding on a pension? With mortgages, loans, savings accounts, it's usually straight forward - pick the one with the best interest rate.

When looking at pensions, what should i be looking for? I'm thinking pick that ones that charge less admin fee's, also choosing a well known company, and one that has given good returns in the past.

What is the best way to go about this? I currently have a stakeholder pension with the Halifax. I started it a few years ago just paying about £40/mth into, stopped paying last year, but now i need to start paying into it or another (better?) pension.

Ben

dunstonh

When looking at pensions, what should i be looking for?

One that offers the investments you want. One that offers the features and options you want. Then you look at costs.

and one that has given good returns in the past.

pensions dont give returns. They dont make or lose money. Its the investments within the pension that do that. Hence you need to decide how you want to invest.

What is the best way to go about this?

Research and knowledge. You also need to decide how you intend to buy as not all pensions are available on the different distribution channels.

Banks rarely offer decent products and even when they offer known insurers, they offer them at full cost and without proper investment advice. So, avoid them. Supermarkets tend to have low quality options as well e.g. Tesco's stakeholder pension is a cut down version of the Norwich Union IFA product.

jamesd

Decide which funds or shares you want to invest in first. Then pick a pension that allows you to use those. The stakeholder ones tend to offer a very small range. Next come personal pensions with a broader choice, sometimes at lower cost than a stakeholder pension. Beyond that come SIPPs in a range of versions with different ranges of options, potentially including buying commercial buildings outright in some of the more costly and flexible ones. No point in paying for the features you don't intend to use.

To see a middle of the road SIPP as far as SIPP choices go, take a look at Hargreaves Lansdown. It can be one of the more expensive choices or one of the cheaper ones, it depends on just what you want to invest in, for how long you want to keep the money there and how much your total pension pot size is. It's fairly inexpensive for modest pot sizes, up to perhaps £50k, but still may be more costly than a personal pension or stakeholder pension purchased from a competitive supplier.

bendix

And whatever you do, don't even think about putting in £40 a month. Double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. Quintuple it . . .make the contributions worthwhile.

Dithering_Dad

bendix wrote: »

And whatever you do, don't even think about putting in £40 a month. Double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. Quintuple it . . .make the contributions worthwhile.

Gotta agree. First step is to estimate how much money you will need in order to fund a comfortable retirement, subtract your state pension from this figure (get a state pension forecast to see how much you'll be entitled to) and then make up the (probably significant) difference with a combination of pension, ISA and other savings and investments.

There are a lot of web sites that will give you an online estimate of how much you need to put away to fund your retirement. It's a scarily large amount of money though. :eek: