Aegon Pension savings

tebbins

1. There will never be a right time.
2. What the markets are doing should have nothing to do with a decision to transfer unless the transfer will involve your money being held up in cash for a significant period of time. Either way your money is invested in something.

Snapdragon

dunstonh said:

Aegon did move some of their older Scottish Equitable plans onto the RR software. Those plans retained the legacy charging structures although used the RR software.  The charges you mention are more in line with those legacy plan maximums (i.e. 1%).

That would be the case then. It was an old Scottish Equitable that I was told had to be moved to Aegon. I haven't touched it since other than to check the yearly statements. I joined my employers newer scheme with Scottish Widows and added as much as I could into that alongside their contributions. As I'm now considering early retirement, I started looking at how I'd use the pots I have and concluded the Aegon one might be a useful one to draw from to fund the time before state pension kicks in, but when I looked at the charges I thought I ought to have moved it elsewhere to something with lower costs. The Vanguard Sipp at 0.15% looked like a good option and I was thinking if I'm likely to draw on it within the next 5 years it might make sense to move to that and keep in cash hence paying a total of 0.15%, even if I did re-invest in something like the Vanguard LifeStrategy that only adds a further 0.22% so a total of 0.37%, instead of the 1% I'm paying Aegon for a similar product.

Albermarle

Alistair31 said:

My Aegon pension has a minimum 1.02% fee, some of the fund choices significantly more. 

Not ideal but my company contribute 8% so...

As you probably know 1% is nowadays on the high side , using standard funds. Maybe you should politely suggest to your employer to try and negotiate a discount or move to a more competitive provider.
Larger employers can get down below 0.5% in my limited experience . Even a smaller employer should be able to get some kind of discount .

sultan123

Albermarle said:

Alistair31 said:

My Aegon pension has a minimum 1.02% fee, some of the fund choices significantly more. 

Not ideal but my company contribute 8% so...

As you probably know 1% is nowadays on the high side , using standard funds. Maybe you should politely suggest to your employer to try and negotiate a discount or move to a more competitive provider.
Larger employers can get down below 0.5% in my limited experience . Even a smaller employer should be able to get some kind of discount .

Is the 1% a charge for maintaining the pension?

Alistair31

sultan123 said:

Albermarle said:

Alistair31 said:

My Aegon pension has a minimum 1.02% fee, some of the fund choices significantly more. 

Not ideal but my company contribute 8% so...

As you probably know 1% is nowadays on the high side , using standard funds. Maybe you should politely suggest to your employer to try and negotiate a discount or move to a more competitive provider.
Larger employers can get down below 0.5% in my limited experience . Even a smaller employer should be able to get some kind of discount .

Is the 1% a charge for maintaining the pension?

1.02% is “all-in” so Aegon’s administration fee and the fund fee together. 

dunstonh

Alistair31 said:

sultan123 said:

Albermarle said:

Alistair31 said:

My Aegon pension has a minimum 1.02% fee, some of the fund choices significantly more. 

Not ideal but my company contribute 8% so...

As you probably know 1% is nowadays on the high side , using standard funds. Maybe you should politely suggest to your employer to try and negotiate a discount or move to a more competitive provider.
Larger employers can get down below 0.5% in my limited experience . Even a smaller employer should be able to get some kind of discount .

Is the 1% a charge for maintaining the pension?

1.02% is “all-in” so Aegon’s administration fee and the fund fee together. 

Is that the actual charge or the factsheet charge?

A lot of Aegons plans use the same funds but only the old legacy plans were at 1%.   Most modern plans (well, pretty much anything from about 2007) was cheaper than 1%.   However, the factsheets show the default maximum.  Not the terms that may be specific to your plan.

Alistair31

That is from the factsheet but since you commented I have hunted high and low on the Aegon site after logging in to my account and can’t see anything to suggest it is anything other than the 1.02%, though I’d love if you were right. 

?

A

dunstonh

Alistair31 said:

That is from the factsheet but since you commented I have hunted high and low on the Aegon site after logging in to my account and can’t see anything to suggest it is anything other than the 1.02%, though I’d love if you were right. 

?

A

I am right. It is also a bit of a regular discussion in the pensions section of this board but applies to many of the providers with legacy pension funds.

You may be on the charge that matches the fund factsheet.  Stakeholder pensions on default terms would match the fund factsheet.  But on discounted terms they would not.   The old Aegon flexible pension plan came in three versions and the charge depended on which version you were in.   

Modern statements often disclose the charges you have paid over the year before.  It won't give you the exact charge in percentage terms as the value is a snaphot on the statement.  In a falling market, the snapshot will be a higher percentage and in a rising market, the snapshot will be a lower one but it's normally only around 0.1% off or thereabouts.

Albermarle

Alistair31 said:

That is from the factsheet but since you commented I have hunted high and low on the Aegon site after logging in to my account and can’t see anything to suggest it is anything other than the 1.02%, though I’d love if you were right. 

?

A

In my experience the only definitive way to get an answer is to contact them directly .

ChainsawCharlie

‘I don't recommend Aegon ( OR Scottish Equitable as they used to be) one bit!! My wife had her workplace pension with Aegon, and was approaching retirement in a 4 years time, and her pension was invested into their glidepath approach,
 designed to gradually de- risk over the next 4 years, however she got made redundant during Covid so decided to go for early retirement. 

She WAS happy to keep the pension invested for 12 months albeit with no further contributions, and phoned Aegon to ask them to move the pension into the lowest risk investment immediatly, rather than gradually reducing in risk over the next 4 years, seen as she was now going to drawdown in 12 months rather than 4 years originally planned 

They assured her they would, but then we found they hadn't, and in fact it was invested in 80% equity!! (Some derisking!) Result during covid was £1,800 loss in 1 week!! They then tried all ways to worm their way out of it, telling lies after lies, until we forced a supervisor to play back the tapes. 

They are incompetent and unprofessional too, we phoned them one day and their phone system put us through to someone working from home, they didn't realise their headset was still live and obviously left on their desk, whilst we overheard her on her mobile slagging off other customers to her colleagues.

We asked on online form to withdraw £2,300 but they withdrew £23,000 the fools.  We christened Aegon with the new more accurate title of ALLGONE. AN extremely unprofessional bunch of idiots. For workplace pensions

If you want a reliable Workplace pension platform I would recommend Peoples Pension, I used them for my own workplace pension and they were fantastic, and have a great Defacto rating, their online account management was 2nd to none, and drawdowns and fund tweaking was easy peasy’