Do you monitor your pension position daily?

MallyGirl

My SIPP is in the same platform as my ISA which I contribute to monthly - I check that this has happened and then update my spreadsheet.
I checked more often in the early days which was helpful in getting a better handle on my attitude to risk (based on my response to fluctuations).

hamishandarchie

I have my Pension account on Moneyhub, an app on my phone. It is updated once a day. 
I certainly do not get worried by the swings up or down, it certainly does not make me want to do anything silly.

Sea_Shell

Pensions, monthly.   Involves logging on to multiple websites.

ISAs, daily.   It's just a tap the app!!

A daily game of "scores on the doors".

"Lost" £2000 yesterday....whatever!!!

My spreadsheet for our overall pots also has a 6 month rolling average graph, which smooths out even the monthly fluctuations.

All good, clean fun!!   (If you like that sort of thing) 😉

westv

Marcon said:

westv said:

dunstonh said:

westv said:

dunstonh said:

Do you monitor your pension position daily?

No.  That would be a silly thing to do and would only lead to anxiety and the potential of poor decision making.

Why assume the one will always lead to the the other?

People who check their values daily are generally anxious. Why else would they check them otherwise?
 

Because they are just nosey? It can take just seconds to check.

Waste of time checking daily. Shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the long term nature of pension investments. Six monthly or annual is fine for those who do understand!

I check Rightmove every day to see what is new but it doesn't mean I want to buy s house.

german_keeper

I have a small works DC scheme to back up my DB scheme. A few years ago I used to check it daily. The reason was for training purposes. Me, my boss and 2 colleagues went on a training course to learn a new method of creating graphs and charts using excel. They all took to it like a duck to water but I'm a bit of a Luddite really and I struggled. So my gaffer suggested I find something to update in excel on a regular basis so I could then practice my new skill. I was trying to think of something and he then said to much merriment all round "the only thing you're interested in is your bloody pension, why don't you use that?" So for a few months first job of the day was to enter the unit price on an excel sheet. Nowadays though it's just once a month, mainly just checking my contributions have gone in really.

dunstonh

Interesting to see some of the people here saying they check daily when they are not the type of posters who I would consider the anxious type.   I still don't think its a good idea but if they are level headed then no harm it in their case.

I spoke with someone last year who said his pension has never gone down before and couldn't understand why it has now (during the CV falls).    He started by saying he wanted it all out because of that and didnt care about the tax.

Once I found out what he had and how long he had it, I was able to see that he had gone through the dot.com period and the credit crunch invested exactly the same.    There was also the 2018 Q4 drop.   He had missed all of these. Partly as he didn't take much interest back then but also because the statement was annual back then and the peak to trough and part recovery happened between statement dates.     His provider had moved to quarterly statements and the volatility was more noticeable. 

This is something I saw with ongoing servicing clients when MIFIDII moved investment statements to quarterly.   People saw the volatility more than they ever had before.  Not always a good thing.

TVAS

You said it you are not a stocks and shares person so I have to ask why your pension is in stocks and shares? Reading between the lines you seem to be an inexperienced investor i.e. someone who not invested in stocks and shares in the past and you have decided to take this risk late in life. It also sounds like monitoring daily means you are really not comfortable with taking risk. To me it seem like a tracker fund would be best for you. Vanguard are the cheapest. Funds, stocks and shares and trackers go up and down we have had large swings in the last 12 months due to Covid. However worldwide equity funds have done well recently. A reason why one should have UK exposure and worldwide exposure. You need to listen to business programmes, read the financial press in order to get a flavour of where to invest. So I imagine over the last year many invested in pharmaceutical stocks. The skill is picking the right one. So I would imagine Pfizer and Astra Zeneca have done well but Glaxo have done badly due to success and failure of the vaccine. You say you want to go to drawdown in the next few years. So it would be prudent to switch to cash for the amount of tax free cash you want. Future income if you can take it in month 12 March. This is because you get 12x12 your annual personal allowance. So lets say you wanted to take 12,500 income next month. No tax at source because you would be in month 12. If you took it in Month 1 April you would be taxed as if a) you were taking 12x12500 i.e. 150k p.a. and b) you would not get a tax rebate on this ad hoc 12,500 until the following April because HMRC would ask you to wait until all your income is known. Maybe review funds quarterly. Good luck. 

Heisenberg01

Yes,everyday, yesterday wiped out 2 weeks of mainly steady gains, bloody frustrating seeing those gains wiped out.

Gonna have to stop.

Ps hope the Reddit/ gamestop bunch all catch anal warts.

Malthusian

Heisenberg01 said:

Ps hope the Reddit/ gamestop bunch all catch anal warts.

Bad news. Anal warts is a sexually transmitted infection.

Malthusian

Probably like Dunston, I always subscribed to the belief that the less you look at your pension value, the better (provided you look at least once a year, or at the point there is an actual decision to be made if earlier). This thread suggests however that some people seem to have benefitted from looking daily as it helps them understand that the day to day movements are just noise.

So perhaps the best frequency to look at a pension fund (in the absence of a specific reason to) is either annually or daily, meaning a market crash becomes a long series of small drops rather than one terrifyingly big one. The worst frequency is at some point between the two. Where the period is long enough for the big drops to seem overwhelmingly scary but short enough that you experience that fear as a constant, rather than just once a year.

I still think checking daily is a bad idea because during a crash, almost every single day you're going to feel bad. On the others, you're going to feel false hope, i.e. "yay, the tide is turning", which then leads to even more disappointment when it falls again the day after and the day after that. And all this negativity isn't compensated on the way out of the crash, when the numbers are green almost every day, because people feel worse about losing £X than they feel good about gaining £X. (Diminishing marginal utility of money.) Still, a lot of people in this thread have survived the corona crash while checking daily, so each to their own coping strategy.

westv said:

I check Rightmove every day to see what is new but it doesn't mean I want to buy s house.

People don't sell houses in a panic because they see that house prices have fallen by 20%.

And wouldn't the IPO section of a financial news website be the equivalent of "what is new" on Rightmove, not today's share prices?