Pension fund charges

Pat38493

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how I know what total % charge I pay on my DC investments after seeing some comments on this board that high charges can be an issue that causes your retirement plan to be sub optimal.

I have - Aegon scheme Retireready with my current employer current value about 80K.   I can see admin charge of about £16 per month going out of the account online.  

The fund factsheet for the fund that it's invested in (100% in Aegon MI Savings (H) - ARC) states that the charges are 0.22%, which corresponds pretty close to the £16 per month I guess.

The papers I was given by my employer in 2017 when this was set up says "the annual charge for the investments used by the default is 0.45%" - it says that it's made up of an platform fee of 0.2% and a fund management fee of 0.25%.

However I can't see anything like that in the transactions online - I can only see what appears to be the fund management fee of about 2.2%

Same is true of my other DC pension which is an Aviva pension invested in "Mercer Growth / Balanced Risk FP" - the factsheet states that it assumes the charges are 0.53% but "these charges may not be the same as your policy".  With the Aviva website you can't seem to see the transactions only the balance.

The last letter I have with the "Annual Review" of my Aviva pension states that the AMC is 0.34%.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether these charges as stated on the document e.g. 0.34% are actually what I'm paying or are their hidden charges within the find which I cannot see? 

Edit:  I do seem to remember one of our pension trusteets of our older DB scheme mad a comment to me that on our old Aviva DC pension we had "a very good deal" on the charges or something like that. 

Albermarle

Typically there is a platform/admin/management charge and there is a charge for the fund . In this case you only directly pay the platform charge . The fund charge is taken automatically out of the fund .
However with some providers the charges are just rolled into one and paid out of the fund . Often in this case there is no cash facility in the pension to pay charges from anyway .

It can be confusing and probably the only way to be sure is to give them a call .