Thinking of Transferring to Interactive Investor

Dew_2

dunstonh said:

 I'll look into in specie. 

I will save you the effort.  You cant use inspecie.

The Aegon Flexible pension plan is a circa 2005-2012 personal pension that uses insured funds only available from Aegon.  It was a cheap pension in its time but is dated by today's standards.  It has some comparable options to VLS and in some cases, can come in cheaper but the lack of drawdown functionality is going to be a blocker.

Tbh, I'd be fine going with 100% equity but can't see any ready packaged option for that on II. 

You don't need a multi-asset fund then. A global equity fund will do the job and would be cheaper.

Many thanks Dunstonh. Yes, the inability to use it for drawdown is the spur for transferring out.

michaels

There is a refer a friend offer on for ii. If someone like me refers you, you get one year platform fee free worth £240 and I get £200.

I moved an expensive Scottish widows fund over to them 2 years ago. I have 75% of my funds in a global equities tracker and 25% in money market basically just to take the edge of the equity volatility whilst not liking bonds. The unexpected inflation has obviously made this expensive piece of mind of late.

With the cheap platform fees and low fund fees the overall cost is about 15 basis points.

Dew_2

Hi Michaels,  they've got an offer on of 6 months free platform fees. Otherwise it looks like the cost is £12.99  a month so how could it be £240 a month? Have I missed something?! If I have I might ask you to refer me!

k_man

It's £12.99 if you only have a SIPP, or £9.99 if you also have a trading/ISA (also starts at £9.99).

The refer a friend saves platform fees (not sure it is for both SIPP and ISA though), but does not include 1 free trade per month (albeit that has recently reduced from 7.99 to 5.99)

Finally there is also cashback for opening an account via Quidco or TCB.

Not suggesting that you should move to II, just that if you do, there may be some other bonuses to be had.

(Edited to fix typo)

Albermarle

k_man said:

It's £12.99 if you only have a SIPP, or £9.99 if you also have a trading/ISA (also starts at £9.99).

The refer a friend saves platform fees (not sure it is for both SIPP and ISA though), but does not include 1 free trade per month (albeit that has recently reduced from 7.99 to 5.99)

Finally there is also cashback for opening an account via Quidco or TCB.

Not suggesting that you should move to II, just that if you do, there may be some other bonuses to be gaf

Transferring a pension of this size to Fidelity , would gain a cashback of £500 ( no need to claim via a third party)
For investment in funds ( OEICs) Fidelity would be more expensive than II, but cheaper if the investments were wholly or partly in IT's and ETF's

k_man

Albermarle said:

k_man said:

It's £12.99 if you only have a SIPP, or £9.99 if you also have a trading/ISA (also starts at £9.99).

The refer a friend saves platform fees (not sure it is for both SIPP and ISA though), but does not include 1 free trade per month (albeit that has recently reduced from 7.99 to 5.99)

Finally there is also cashback for opening an account via Quidco or TCB.

Not suggesting that you should move to II, just that if you do, there may be some other bonuses to be gaf

Transferring a pension of this size to Fidelity , would gain a cashback of £500 ( no need to claim via a third party)
For investment in funds ( OEICs) Fidelity would be more expensive than II, but cheaper if the investments were wholly or partly in IT's and ETF's

Indeed, other platforms are available.
This was more: if going to II, don't miss out. II also had a similar reward for transferring in, but ended recently.

Dew_2

Thank you k_man and Albermarle. I would only be opening a SIPP.  I've just looked and can see that Fidelity doesn't charge drawdown fees (I know II doesn't). I'll look into Fidelity also. 

Albermarle

Dew_2 said:

Thank you k_man and Albermarle. I would only be opening a SIPP.  I've just looked and can see that Fidelity doesn't charge drawdown fees (I know II doesn't). I'll look into Fidelity also. 

Fidelity has almost no charges for anything, including drawdown, but the platform fee of 0.35% will make it more expensive than II for OEIC funds. Two caveats to that 
1) If your fund sized reaches £250K, the platform fee drops to 0.2% for the whole amount.
2) If you invest in exchange traded products - means anything that is openly traded in the market , such as Investment Trusts, ETF's and individual shares, the platform fee is capped at £45, which is ridiculously low. Although you will pay £10 for each purchase.

However if you do not understand /do not want to invest in these types of products, it would not make sense to change your investment strategy to suit a particular platforms charging arrangements.

Notepad_Phil

Dew_2 said:

...:

Is it better to do the transfer in a falling or rising market, or doesn't it matter?

...

As it seems that you won't be able to do an in specie transfer then preferably you'd do a cash transfer into a continuously falling market so that the fund prices were lower when you came to repurchase them - but nobody knows beforehand whether the market will continue with its previous direction or suddenly move into the exact opposite and potentially you get multiple percent rises over sometimes very short periods of time.

On average there's going to be very little difference between the winners and losers of doing a cash transfer (though as in the long term markets rise, there's likely to be slightly more losers - i.e. you have to buy your funds at a price higher than you sold them for), but that may not be comforting if you transfer your £200k+ portfolio and markets do rise by say 5% over the transfer period.

A potential way to mitigate the size of any potential loss is to to do the transfer in multiple chunks over a period of time. You'd have to investigate to see whether you can do that with your platforms, but it's something I did and I felt much happier knowing that I would have to be very unlucky to have every transfer hit by one of the big periodic rises that do happen from time to time. There is of course the fact that the more chunks you transfer the more chance there is that one of them is hit by a big rise in markets, but it will of course be against a smaller sum of money.

Dew_2

Notepad_Phil said:

Dew_2 said:

...:

Is it better to do the transfer in a falling or rising market, or doesn't it matter?

...

As it seems that you won't be able to do an in specie transfer then preferably you'd do a cash transfer into a continuously falling market so that the fund prices were lower when you came to repurchase them - but nobody knows beforehand whether the market will continue with its previous direction or suddenly move into the exact opposite and potentially you get multiple percent rises over sometimes very short periods of time.

On average there's going to be very little difference between the winners and losers of doing a cash transfer (though as in the long term markets rise, there's likely to be slightly more losers - i.e. you have to buy your funds at a price higher than you sold them for), but that may not be comforting if you transfer your £200k+ portfolio and markets do rise by say 5% over the transfer period.

A potential way to mitigate the size of any potential loss is to to do the transfer in multiple chunks over a period of time. You'd have to investigate to see whether you can do that with your platforms, but it's something I did and I felt much happier knowing that I would have to be very unlucky to have every transfer hit by one of the big periodic rises that do happen from time to time. There is of course the fact that the more chunks you transfer the more chance there is that one of them is hit by a big rise in markets, but it will of course be against a smaller sum of money.

Hi Notepad Phil, thank you for explaining that to me.  I'll need to check if Aegon allow transferring in chunks with my particular pension. Lots to think about!