pension review

pastie78

i was contacted today by a company called pension shield, they want to review my current pension and select a new one for me. im very suspicious of cold calling and telephone sales. any one had any dealing with them and is it legit???

jem16

pastie78 wrote: »

i was contacted today by a company called pension shield, they want to review my current pension and select a new one for me. im very suspicious of cold calling and telephone sales. any one had any dealing with them and is it legit???

Reputable financial companies do not cold-call. Avoid them.

if you really want a pension review find an IFA for yourself from https://www.unbiased.co.uk

Drp8713

You are right to ask the question. Regulated financial firms cant cold call. So its either a scam or they are breaking the rules. Either way not a company i would want to deal with.

if you want a review either approach an IFA or post the details here and people will help.

dunstonh

i was contacted today by a company called pension shield,

Decent regulated companies do not cold call. Most cold calls on pensions are scams.

There is no company called pension shield on the FSA register. This means they are not lawfully allowed to review pensions.

mania112

dunstonh wrote: »

This means they are not lawfully allowed to review pensions.

Not strictly true (not that i'm defending these companies).

What they tend to do is run a cost analysis (using selectapension, O&M or the like) and identify the differences. Particularly they look at fees.

Without explicitly naming a recommendation, they are ok to complete a 'review' and say there are savings to be made by transferring.

The trouble is, however, the hidden agenda is that this pension review companies are normally a front for a dodgy investment in a SIPP and by the time the client is asked by the sales agent if they would like to buy/invest in a shed in Brazil they've already been planted with the seed that their current pension is no good.

To find a legitimate adviser and to review your pension, qualified and authorised IFA's are found at https://www.unbiased.co.uk

pastie78

thank you so much for your advice, i am looking into getting independent financial advice. and will continue to be wary of telephone callers x:j

jamesd

For a person who hates cold calls you did a great job of encouraging more of them. Everyone like you who does business with a firm as a result of cold calling encourages more of it.

The cost reductions from a transfer aren't enough to double the value of a pension. This probably means that they have used different projected increases than the place you transferred from was using. Charges are nice and easy to point to but it's the investment growth that really matters. You might have been switched into something with lower growth prospects (but a higher projection value used) than you had before.

How much did you end up being charged for something you could have done yourself for nothing but filling in a form or even just making one phone call to a place that accepts transfer requests by phone?

wallpaperman

shwebbmahmood wrote: »

I suppose I should be grateful to Pension Shield as now my pension is looking like double in value for when I retire, but I still HATE those cold calls!!

I find your whole post very far fetched, especially this statement.

If you could post some details of the synopsis that you were provided with, that would be interesting.

Double your money eh? They should be the busiest financial company in the country on word of mouth alone from satisfied customers, and not relying on cold calling people.

dunstonh

In summary there seems to be concerns by some government initiated regulators such as the financial conduct authority and the department for work and pensions that pension providers have been taking too much out of peoples pension life savings.

That is a common scammers line.

The person I spoke to provided assumptions that upto 1/3 of my pension may be taken by my pension provider through charges

Lazy example with no context. Similar to saying that if Tesco allowed you to buy food at cost then over your lifetime you would be £1 million better off. Is that £1million in todays money or future terms?

The links where for BBC Panorama and some government produced Youtube videos which substantiated Pension shield claims.

please provide the links to the Govt produced videos.

I then looked into other information and found that many people who have already retired or coming to retirement have made complaints to the financial ombudsmen about huge amounts taken out of their pension over their lifetime.

Yet the ombudsman figures dont suggest any such level of complaints and even if there were, the omdudsman would not uphold those complaints as long as the charges were within the contract terms.

Then it occured to me that maybe its purposely illustrated in this way so poor fools like me cannot understand what's going on until its too late. It was clear that I needed some financial advice from someone who can make sense of the nonsense!

You certainly need advice as it appears you have fallen for SPIN and misinformation and not factual and correct information.

I then dug up the email sent by Pension Shield a few weeks before and contacted them, I told them I was always dubious about cold calls which is why I did not pursue with them when they called.

And you should be dubious. No genuine regulated company cold calls.

. I was keen to know why a reputable Financial advisor firm would make cold calls. I was told that pension Shield is not the financial advice company but a marketing company that works with several regulated financial companies which provide the advice because they do not make the calls themselves for some reason.

Our compliance company issued a compliance warning last year saying that they recommend that no IFA deals with introducers like this as the IFA may become responsible for what the introducer says.

According to pension shield their role is to contact people who may and assess if they qualify for a free review and if they do process the applications and provide the info to their partners who actually conduct the review.

There is no such thing as a free review. That is why the Govt and the regulators keep putting out warnings to people to not act on cold calls offering free pension reviews.

The summary showed that my current provider had taken out Tens' of thousands in charges and I didn't even know!

Did they put context on those charges?
How about the charges that will be on their alternative?

I suppose I should be grateful to Pension Shield as now my pension is looking like double in value for when I retire,

Or you may have been lied to and the whole lot is a scam. In this case, its more likely that you have paid fees to be put into an alternative and the cold caller has got a cut of those fees.

Considering what you have said, they have taken advantage of your lack of knowledge to earn money out of you rather than the explain things so you understand them. It could well be that an alternative was better. However, they should have presented it in a factual way. The most common method used by IFAs (And expected by the regulator and ombudsman) is a comparison between the existing plan to selected retirement age and the proposed plan as well as a benchmark against stakeholder pensions. All using the same growth rate. This information should be presented to you (mandatory). The figures can show old plans being better through to very big differences. However, the focus is on now until selected retirement age. You dont appear to have been supplied that information as you make no reference to it.

The last "free pension review" client I managed to intercept had an Aviva statement & projection and the scammer used that official document in a totally inappropriate way to mislead the client to make them think they were paying more in charges than they were and that their pension would lose money (they used the low rate projection which is a negative return).

sandsy

I smell a scam from Schwebbmahmood, first time poster and all that, extolling the virtues of a single company that everyone else is suspicious of.....

RichandJ

sandsy wrote: »

I smell a scam from Schwebbmahmood, first time poster and all that, extolling the virtues of a single company that everyone else is suspicious of.....

Of course he's one of the scammers. Just look at the drivel he posted. Then ran away. The username smells as well.