mis-sold pension & fscs

shedboy57

My pension fund has come up way below expectations, I have complained to the provider Norwich union/Aviva,they blame the seller noyce livett, I have been through the complaints procedure FSCS and have had no joy,my pension pot has come up £50,000 less than some of my work colleagues that opted out of serps at exactly the same time as me. How do I find out where my money has gone and how do I get it back.Would be grateful for any advice or similar situations and how you dealt with it

dunstonh

My pension fund has come up way below expectations

What do you mean expectation?

I have complained to the provider Norwich union/Aviva,they blame the seller noyce livett

Provider has no liability for advice complaints unless they gave the advice.

I have been through the complaints procedure FSCS and have had no joy

Why was that? was it because expectation is not something you can complain about?

my pension pot has come up £50,000 less than some of my work colleagues that opted out of serps at exactly the same time as me.

Is that because their rebates were higher? or their date of birth was different? or they used different investment funds? or that they contracted back in at a different time?

The rebates differed depending on your age.

How do I find out where my money has gone and how do I get it back.

You dont. You get what you get. You cant look at others as their details will be different. You wouldnt expect them to be the same.

shedboy57

My money was invested for 26 years and I have got a return of £87 per month,which in anyones language is tantamount to daylight robbery, and my peers with the much better pots are all my age group and did not opt back in to serps

PeacefulWaters

shedboy57 wrote: »

My money was invested for 26 years and I have got a return of £87 per month,which in anyones language is tantamount to daylight robbery, and my peers with the much better pots are all my age group and did not opt back in to serps

Perhaps they made different investment choices.

redmalc

Shedboy I am sorry to say that's the way the cookie crumbles with investments,I wish I never put 40K into a fund that dropped 62% in eight months.

DaveMcG

Hello Shedboy

my peers with the much better pots are all my age group and did not opt back in to serps

What age were you when you opted out and what age were you when you opted back in?

For a number of reasons it was considered prudent to opt back into serps when certain pivotal ages were reached.

You will have a fund for the period you were opted out and also additional state pension benefits for the period opted back in.

Is the £87 your additional state pension benefits? Is it the annuity from your opted out fund? Or both added together?

jamesd

shedboy57 wrote: »

my pension pot has come up £50,000 less than some of my work colleagues that opted out of serps at exactly the same time as me. How do I find out where my money has gone and how do I get it back.Would be grateful for any advice or similar situations and how you dealt with it

To start it helps to know how much money was being paid in. SERPs and S2P contracting out was contracting out of the earnings-related part of the state pension. The amount of the rebate paid into the pension depends on the income of each person and two people of the same age and with the same investment choices could have very different final values if one was consistently earning 25% or 50% more than the other.

Next comes the choices of pension provider and investments. Each pension provider will have different charges and so will the investments used. Different investments have performed differently over the years and each person has in general been free to change pension firm or investments at any time they wanted to.

The FSCS doesn't normally handle claims like this unless an adviser recommended a particular change and their firm has gone bust. Before that the Financial Ombudsman Service would normally decide if there was a problem. As a general principle the FOS will not uphold a complaint that is based solely on the performance of the investments. Instead they look at whether the advice to contract out was correct and whether the correct general type of investment was used, considering things like the age and risk tolerance of the investor who was being given the advice.

So given what you have told us so far it's not possible for us to know whether you were mis-sold the contracting out or the investment choice. We also can't say whether your investments performed well or badly because we have no idea of how much was paid in and what the final value was. To give some more specific guidance on these things we need to know:

1. how old you were when you contracted out.
2. what your specified risk tolerance was? Things like whether you said you could take a 40% drop in a bad year or were risk-averse or only wanted low risk things.
3. what pension firm and investments were used.
4. what the contracted out rebate being paid in was for each year and the date when it was paid in.
5. the current pot value.

Without that we have to rely on the general result that pretty much everyone who contracted out has ended up better off and that probably does include you. But we can't be sure because we don't have enough information to be sure.

dunstonh

not helpful

It was helpful. You just chose to ignore it

My money was invested for 26 years and I have got a return of £87 per month,which in anyones language is tantamount to daylight robbery,

Try and give us some facts.

my peers with the much better pots are all my age group and did not opt back in to serps

So, they all had the same date of birth, same timescales, some earnings, same contracted out period, same investment fund and same health as you?
That is unlikely. You can go on about daylight robbery but it wont be. The figures will be relative to the size of the rebates.

You have your state pension, so how much was the deduction on that for contracting out?