SIPP - please help me get out of this pickle!

masonic

If this is money that you intend to keep invested for a long period of time, or even draw down slowly as an income, Vanguard TR 2025 is probably not the best choice of fund. If you need help identifying what a better choice of fund(s) should be, then the peace of mind is probably worth the cost of some independent financial advice. Trying to get advice from people here and then being unsure about the choices made is a recipe for disaster.

masonic

In response to your PM (sent due to having difficulties replying to my above post)

You said you thought your situation was so simple that you didn't need an adviser. A simple situation is a good starting point to choose your own investments, but it is not sufficient. You also need to have the understanding, or willingness to invest the time to learn, about types of investment that are suitable for your situation, how to combine investments to reach a portfolio of appropriate risk, how to analyse the composition of investment funds, etc. Fundamentally you need to understand what you are investing in as you will be 100% responsible for the choices you make. Plenty of people do not have this understanding, nor the inclination to learn, so they pay someone else to do this work for them.

You expressed concern about an adviser putting you on the right path. They will look into your situation in detail and recommend investments that suit your circumstances, objectives and risk tolerance. They will explain what you can expect to happen to your investments in various situations and they would be able to help you on an ongoing basis to put actual results into context. This seems to be exactly the sort of help you are looking for. You would have confidence they are putting you on the right path, because they have a regulatory duty to choose appropriately for you, and if they did not you may be able to claim compensation for losses suffered as a result of being put in inappropriate investments. A halfway house is to use a 'robo-advice' service where you get taken through a series of questions designed to probe your attitude to risk and basic circumstances and a risk-based portfolio is recommended at the end - however, this still puts most of the responsibility on you, and you'd be unlikely to have any comeback if you were subsequently unhappy, and no hand-holding through difficult times.

You mentioned your current approach would be to just pick a fund from the top 10 recommended by HL. HL do not make personal recommendations unless you pay them for financial advice (and this is not a good advice option). The only top 10 I'm aware of is the top 10 they publish based on what is most popular with their own DIY investors. This is a list that has included in the recent past Scottish Mortgage Trust (ultra high risk, subsequently fell 50% and is yet to recover), Woodford Equity Income (embroiled in scandal and closed down after a significant loss), etc. It would be unwise to pick investments based on popularity. You would know nothing about how these funds are being used in individual investors' portfolios, you probably wouldn't understand them, or why they were chosen by others. HL also run their 'wealth shortlist' (and web tools that will guide people into a specific subset of funds within that list), but this is dominated by funds that offer special discounts and has also included some shocking choices in the recent past. Not to mention their very expensive multimanager funds, which in my view offer the worst of all worlds. So you can be very confident that an Independent Financial Adviser would do a much better job than this approach!