Have you been stung by Pension Bee?

penners324

My PensionBee funds are about level since early 2020.

I am un the fossil free plan

Malthusian

penners324 said:

My PensionBee funds are about level since early 2020.

I am un the fossil free plan

That isn't great but on a par with how bond-heavy mixed asset funds have performed. (The IA Mixed Investment 0-35% sector index is up 2% since 1/1/2020 and the 20-60% sector is up 7%.)
The fossil fuel free plan is 100% equities, but presumably there have been some fund switches as it didn't launch until late 2020.

michael1234

I think its ok to be unhappy about your poorly performing stocks/funds that are in a pension wrapper so long as we don't expect the rest of society to bail you out if you made poor choices.

My main beef with this view is what has led to the industry being IMO overly burdened with red tape and regulation. It is what requires me to take "advice" which isn't advice at all but mandatory instruction costing more than 5% of my entire pension pot. My understanding is the reason for that is insurance against that advice turning out to be bad and be suing. I should not be able to sue anyone for giving me advice in good faith. It should be up to me how I spend my money including whether for example I want to transfer my hybrid pension. The advice should therefore cost maybe £250 per hour spent rather than 20 grand.....

Albermarle

I should not be able to sue anyone for giving me advice in good faith

If you pay for professional financial advice and it turns out the advice was poor/mistaken or just plain wrong, then you would not sue them or ask for compensation??

Same with a Doctor or a solicitor. The public have to have a right to sue for bad advice/malpractice/mistakes etc

eskbanker

michael1234 said:

I think its ok to be unhappy about your poorly performing stocks/funds that are in a pension wrapper

It's OK to be unhappy about that but it clearly isn't OK to blame that performance on the pension company when they're not the ones making the decisions about what to invest in....

dunstonh

. It is what requires me to take "advice" which isn't advice at all but mandatory instruction costing more than 5% of my entire pension pot. 

Advice is not mandatory, apart from a few rare circumstances where guarantees exist that are likely to be best kept and hardly any charge 5%.     

The advice should therefore cost maybe £250 per hour spent rather than 20 grand.....

£20k?   Who the heck charges that amount?

dancergirl217

Malthusian said:

The good news is that MSE threads are read by a large number of lurkers who come across them via Google, read them and then leave without leaving a trace. This means that although a helpful reply may be totally wasted on the original poster, that doesn't mean it is wasted full stop; it could help many other people without any of us knowing about it. 

I am one of those lurkers, finally making my first posts today, after years of just reading, and I have really appreciated the thoughtful and informative posts on the pensions/retirement board in particular. I've learned a lot, so thank you to everybody who takes the time to contribute. I've been DIY investing since around 2006, so plenty of downs as well as ups in that time, the differing opinions of the posters here have helped keep a sense of perspective, through the moves in both directions. Thank you to all the regular posters!

Marcon

michael1234 said:

I think its ok to be unhappy about your poorly performing stocks/funds that are in a pension wrapper so long as we don't expect the rest of society to bail you out if you made poor choices.

My main beef with this view is what has led to the industry being IMO overly burdened with red tape and regulation. It is what requires me to take "advice" which isn't advice at all but mandatory instruction costing more than 5% of my entire pension pot. 

The problem is that although many people know what they want to do (or think they do), they don't necessarily know what they're doing by transferring.

Advice needs to be accurate and fully informed - negligent advice is negligent, whether or not given in 'good faith'. There are sometimes good reasons for transferring out against advice, albeit these are few in number. I wonder how many claims we'll see from people who were wrongly told by their adviser that they couldn't transfer out of a DB scheme unless an adviser recommended doing so (an erroneous statement repeated on this forum for a very long time) when that has never been the case. Many such individuals are now looking at transfer values which can be 40% or so lower than they were a couple of years ago - not to mention the fact that they paid fees for advice which was based on an incorrect premise.