Standard Life question

kambinky

A few weeks ago I had letters from Standard Life with whom I had pension arrangement to say they are demutualising and I would get shares - I don;t have to do anything ..But listening to an early morning radio 4 programme a couple of days ago it said lots of people hadn't claimed their windfalls! What is this and should I be doing something with the money invested or just leave it alone?

EdInvestor

SL demutualised back in July.Before then you should have had loads of documents telling you all about the shares, plus voting papers earlier on.Did you receive them?

Is your pension invested in the With profits fund? (Have a look at your bonus statement).

curtlyb

I heard the same thing on the radio.
I opted out of Serps with Standard Life back in the 80's (through a financial advisor) and had a letter saying that i didn't qualify early this year, since then i've seen and heard of plenty of people with Serps 'opt-outs' who do qualify ??? Are they saying (in the radio programme) that Standard Life have made mistakes as to whether or not you qualify or just missed people out when paying the money ???
I'm now wondering whether to query my status with them ????

dunstonh

You only qualify if you are in the with profits fund. If you are in unit linked funds, then you do not. However, dont worry about that if you are in unit linked as your investment performance has almost certainly been a lot better than the with profits fund and by amount much greater than the average payout.

curtlyb

dunstonh wrote:

You only qualify if you are in the with profits fund. If you are in unit linked funds, then you do not. However, dont worry about that if you are in unit linked as your investment performance has almost certainly been a lot better than the with profits fund and by amount much greater than the average payout.

Cheers, that's my perfect answer:beer:

kambinky

Thanks Ed Investor - it is a with profits pension due and says I have 340 shares the pension stopped when I joined a new company and so should I remove the money now and put it elsewhere?

dunstonh

Standard Life have a range of funds with greater investment potential so you dont need to put it eleswhere if you dont want to. Its just a case of picking the funds that are appropriate to your risk profile once you know what is available to you.

EdInvestor

Yes, it would be good to move the money out of the With profits fund and into a few others that are better performers.No need to move the money out of SL though, as the charges are low and the fund selection good.

Your shares will be in an account at Computershare,
tel 0870 703 6250 for info, and are currently worth around 910 quid. .