Nest or Legal and General

Hireatrade

I have been with Nest for around 5 years as a self-employment pension. Now, I got a job and they use Legal and General for the company's pension. I can still keep my Nest but not sure if the company is able to contribute there? I will have to investigate more about it. Any advice for me, please?

JoeCrystal

Compare the benefits and costs of the schemes in question and transfer the Nest pension into the Legal and General if appropriate.

Linton

Employers will normally only pay into their own scheme. The admin of everyone doing something different would be far too much hassle apart from perhaps for extremely small companies.

There is no great need to merge pensions, just marginal advantages in convenience or lower charges. In particular, large employers may subsidise the admin, at least for current employees.

AnotherJoe

Leave the Nest where it is. As said its extremely unlikely your new employer will pay into Nest so stick with the l&G company scheme.
Should you later move again you can look at consolidating nest into l&g or vice-versa whilst you are now with new employers scheme, so long term you keep it simple with two pensions, one is current employers and the other all previous consolidated into one scheme.

Albermarle

More important than which scheme , is how much is going into it each month .
The minimum auto enrolment amounts of 3% employer and 5% employee are inadequate to build up a big enough pot at retirement .
Ideally both should contribute more.

scalextric

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Leave the Nest where it is. As said its extremely unlikely your new employer will pay into Nest so stick with the l&G company scheme.
Should you later move again you can look at consolidating nest into l&g or vice-versa whilst you are now with new employers scheme, so long term you keep it simple with two pensions, one is current employers and the other all previous consolidated into one scheme.

I was curious why you would recomend having one current pension pot, then a 2nd that is all the old pensions combined. Why is this better than moving all the pensions to the current work place pension provider. Is it encase the current one does not accept transfers in, or is there a benefit to doing this? Thanks

SonOf

I have been with Nest for around 5 years as a self-employment pension

Its an unusual choice for someone self employed. I know NEST offer it but its not what it is primarily designed for.

Now, I got a job and they use Legal and General for the company's pension. I can still keep my Nest but not sure if the company is able to contribute there? I will have to investigate more about it. Any advice for me, please?

it is highly unlikely the employer will contribute to your personal pension.
1 - it would require you to opt-out of the workplace scheme and declare you are an opt out on application to pay into another provider
2 - the employer is unlikely to set up bespoke arrangements for just you.
3 - If they do it for you, then they would have to do it for all employees or face discrimination claims (note - there are scenarios where this would not apply - such as company directors)

Albermarle

I was curious why you would recomend having one current pension pot, then a 2nd that is all the old pensions combined. Why is this better than moving all the pensions to the current work place pension provider. Is it encase the current one does not accept transfers in, or is there a benefit to doing this? Thanks

Normally both options would be OK as most Workplace pensions are happy to accept transfers in . It's probably largely a matter of personal preference .If you were a more experienced investor you might think the typical workplace/auto enrolment pensions were too restricted on investments choices, and prefer to have a separate SIPP with more choices.
Also if your funds grew to a good size then you might start to think about not having all your eggs in one basket, although with pensions this is not a big worry.

AnotherJoe

scalextric wrote: »

I was curious why you would recommend having one current pension pot, then a 2nd that is all the old pensions combined. Why is this better than moving all the pensions to the current work place pension provider. Is it encase the current one does not accept transfers in, or is there a benefit to doing this? Thanks

Gives the OP some time to see which scheme is doing best before making a decision. Also, especially just after joining, suppose the job doesn't work out and he's moving on after few months.