Wow - that was quick

ffacoffipawb

A week today I filled a form in on Hargreaves Lansdown's website to transfer a Standard Life Active Pension to my Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP.

The money was credited today.

Seven days.

Impressive.

Shedman

As it should be in this day and age.

As a contrast I applied to transfer a Liberty XO SIPP to Fidelity (one stock and some cash so not complicated) in mid March and it should hopefully finally be completed in next couple of days ....let's just say I'm far from impressed by the fact it's taken over 3 1/2 months for what should be a few computer entries.

Albermarle

Earlier this year I transferred an Aviva pension to Fidelity ( in cash)
I filled in the on line details with Fidelity on Sunday afternoon, and the funds arrived on Tuesday afternoon
Maybe a record !

SonOf

Std Life and Aviva are two of the quickest (apart from on legacy plans/hybrid plans which require manual calculations).

Unfortunately, HL are not as quick as those two (based on the transfers out I have experienced).

ffacoffipawb

SonOf wrote: »

Std Life and Aviva are two of the quickest (apart from on legacy plans/hybrid plans which require manual calculations).

Unfortunately, HL are not as quick as those two (based on the transfers out I have experienced).

I requested a small pot £10,000 payment from HL last week. This uses nil LTA and does not invoke MPAA.

The £8,500 payout net of 20% tax on 75% of the money arrived in my bank today.

I think that's pretty good really.

jamesd

ffacoffipawb wrote: »

I requested a small pot £10,000 payment from HL last week.

Did you try asking for:

1. take benefit from £13333 in the form of 3333.25 PCLS and 9999.75 placed into flexi-access drawdown
2. use small pot rule on the 9999.75 flexi-access drawdown arrangement

EdSwippet

ffacoffipawb wrote: »

I requested a small pot £10,000 payment from HL last week. This uses nil LTA and does not invoke MPAA.

Do you happen to know if this 'small pots' rule is only applicable to literal small pension pots, or can it be used to carve out a £10k chunk of a larger pension? I've Googled, but so far not come up with anything of much use.

I have a SIPP that is bubbling around just under the LTA. Because of crystallisation timing uncertainty caused by the 19th century pension snail-mail processes in use at my 21st century platform, I may not hit the LTA exactly. If my pensions turn out to exceed the LTA, it would be nice to think that I could use 'small pots' to extract up to £30k of overrun without LTA penalties.

ffacoffipawb

EdSwippet wrote: »

Do you happen to know if this 'small pots' rule is only applicable to literal small pension pots, or can it be used to carve out a £10k chunk of a larger pension? I've Googled, but so far not come up with anything of much use.

I have a SIPP that is bubbling around just under the LTA. Because of crystallisation timing uncertainty caused by the 19th century pension snail-mail processes in use at my 21st century platform, I may not hit the LTA exactly. If my pensions turn out to exceed the LTA, it would be nice to think that I could use 'small pots' to extract up to £30k of overrun without LTA penalties.

HL will carve out £10k into a separate arrangement to take a small pot. They have just done this for me and it is not an UFPLS and uses no LTA and does not invoke MPAA. They have confirmed willingness to do this.

I will do another next year and another the year after that. Only three goes allowed.

ffacoffipawb

jamesd wrote: »

Did you try asking for:

1. take benefit from £13333 in the form of 3333.25 PCLS and 9999.75 placed into flexi-access drawdown
2. use small pot rule on the 9999.75 flexi-access drawdown arrangement

That will invoke MPAA which i did not want.

EdSwippet

ffacoffipawb wrote: »

HL will carve out £10k into a separate arrangement to take a small pot. They have just done this for me and it is not an UFPLS and uses no LTA and does not invoke MPAA. They have confirmed willingness to do this.

I will do another next year and another the year after that. Only three goes allowed.

Thanks for that. I'm not with HL, so I'll see if my SIPP provider will do this. I'm sceptical, but worth asking.

I get the sense from reading the HMRC doc on this that opening a separate arrangement like this could invalidate my FP2016. However, at the point I need to do it I'll have burned through all my LTA anyway, so nothing left to invalidate.

Thanks for the note here. I'll keep this in my back pocket just in case. It might even be worth moving a bit of my pension (partial transfer) to HL if useful. Though again I can imagine that might turn out to be impossible to achieve for some reason. What a pain in the butt the LTA is.

jamesd

ffacoffipawb wrote: »

That will invoke MPAA which i did not want.

Taking a PCLS doesn't trigger the MPAA. Placing money into a flexi-access drawdown account doesn't trigger the MPAA. The use of the small pots rule doesn't trigger the MPAA. It's entirely fine to do what I described.

The MPAA would be triggered if money from the drawdown account was flexibly accessed, meaning withdrawing without use of the small pots rule.

Doing what I described would use some lifetime allowance.