Any way to force your company to pay into a SIPP?

dunstonh

I know this might take a while to set up, but once it's going, surely it would take nominal management.

No. At the moment, they send a single payment each month that gets distributed. If everyone had their own individual schemes they employer wouldnt be able to edit the amounts as easily. Many would be required to do it manually. Each scheme would have its own payment. So, if you had 500 employees, you would have 500 payments. It would be a nightmare. This is why group schemes exist. It cuts the admin right down. It would take a member of staff days to do the admin whereas its probably just a couple of hours now.

The scheme is a corporate stakeholder scheme, so I guess the cap does apply.

As its a group stakeholder pension then it will apply. It also means it uses the retail funds which have data fully published for research.

jamesd

Pangolin, ask if you're able to do a partial transfer out. My large company money purchase scheme is happy enough to accept occasional partial transfers out and that's enough to get you more investment choices with say one or two transfers a year. Hargreaves Lansdown is one SIPP provider that is willing to take transfers of this sort.

tawl_2

you can always have your own sipp alongside your stakeholder pension as long your annual contributions are within the rules. the transfer option mentioned above i guess is possible but that will probably mean you are opting out of the stakeholder pension and therefore future contributions will stop.

i think the important point about poor returns is that everyone is in the same boat, you will need to see if your provider has actually done the least worst out of all providers out there. i don't think that investment managers have no motivation, there aren't only individuals that invest in those funds, pension schemes invest huge amounts of money and there is a lot of competition out there to see who is doing better or least worst. you may want to ask how Standard Life fund has compared against their benchmark.

if you decide to go it alone, good luck, there are risks and certain bigger possible returns as well as bigger worst returns... if i knew the answer, i'll be on a yatch somewhere in near a carribean island *sigh*