How to choose a SIPP or Personal Pension?

Albermarle

means you just don't really see pre-funding outside workplace pensions or IFA platforms.

Individual personal pensions with the likes of SL; Aviva: SW et al are also prefunded . Not sure about stakeholders.

which is surely better than taking your net pay after paying national insurance and deciding you are going to put it into a pension after all.

Of course this is true but the advantage varies a lot depending on your situation:
It can be as high as nearly 26% or as low as 2% . In the latter case contributing separately to a SIPP/PP instead of Salsac can be suitable for some people ( variable pay for one reason)

AnotherJoe

Albermarle wrote: »

A lot of SL customers seem to have a special discount , usually where an ex employer has negotiated a deal and it has stayed with the pension .
No you don't get the standard discount on top:D

Pity because they'd be paying me

SonOf

Individual personal pensions with the likes of SL; Aviva: SW et al are also prefunded . Not sure about stakeholders.

Most stakeholders are prefunded. Its more to do with the provider than the product.

bowlhead99

Albermarle wrote: »

Individual personal pensions with the likes of SL; Aviva: SW et al are also prefunded . Not sure about stakeholders.

Yes that was probably a bad generalisation; the OP mentioned themselves that they already had a personal pension with SL which prefunded, before going on to talk about the sipps that didn't, and it was the latter type of providers (AJ Bell, Fidelity, Hargreaves Lansdown, Interactive Investor, various online stockbroker products) on which I was making generalisations.

The distinction for the DIY (not workplace, not IFA) market is probably more between the providers that historically offered their own insurance-company type employer or personal pensions (like Aviva, Scottish Widows etc) and the ones billing themselves as DIY fund supermarket SIPP products where you can get funds and investment trusts and ETFs (and perhaps individual company shares).

In the latter model the investing is more unique from customer to customer and perhaps seen as more modular: an 'adding cash' component, a 'investing on the stock exchange' component, an 'investing through fund platform services' component, corporate actions, tax reclaims, paying your platform administration fee as something independent from the costs borne in the OEICs or ITs etc etc; lots of different cycles of activity.

While with the providers such as Scottish Widows who have been offering their own insured funds (and own versions of other people's funds) for years, there is more of a standard end to end journey of money arriving and that amount being allocated to new units of an agreed mix and you're done (meanwhile the provider goes off and does the tax reclaims, having already allocated you units based on the cash he knows you'll have available in the end).

Still, even in saying the above there is still some generalisation in there, as there are differences across the market but perhaps better explained than my first attempt.

Of course this is true but the advantage varies a lot depending on your situation:
It can be as high as nearly 26% or as low as 2% . In the latter case contributing separately to a SIPP/PP instead of Salsac can be suitable for some people ( variable pay for one reason)

Yes, and in the latter situation I have personally sometimes preferred the flexibility of a separate sipp rather than absolutely maximising the salary sacrifice - when the NI benefit to me is only a one-off 2% and our HR rules not being very accommodative of mid-year changes in contributions rates.

In the OPs situation he was already sacrificing down to the level at which he'd avoid student loan payments, so, unlikely to be one of those people who was still on £50k+ post-sacrifice and thereby on a 2% marginal NI rate.