Best Drawdown Pension Provider

Spivo46

With 350k to invest in a pension drawdown at 64 who should i choose? Currently with Royal London and in Governed portfolio 4. 

Linton

It depends on what you mean by "best".  All the mainstream ones you will find mentioned  on this forum should be fine for your purposes, the main exception could be Vanguard where you can only use Vanguard funds.

So that covers II, HL, AJBell, iWeb, Fidelity, BestInvest, Halifax and no doubt others which I forget.

 The main differences are at the second level in such things as website features and ease of use, access to more esoteric investments, helpfulness of customer support, in-house paid-for advice etc and of course cost.

Charging comes in two forms - either as a % of your investments or fixed rates.  For your size of pot a fixed rate platform would probably work out cheapest.  There are possible extra charges dependent on level of trading - a % based platform would probably charge less, if not nothing to trade.  The trading costs of a fixed rate platform would probably be higher.

I use II, AJBell, and Bestinvest and would not argue strongly against any of them.  II is probably the largest fixed fee platform and HL, with % based charges, the overall market leader and most expensive.  On the other hand HL is arguably the best with the second level considerations..

Albermarle

Spivo46 said:

With 350k to invest in a pension drawdown at 64 who should i choose? Currently with Royal London and in Governed portfolio 4. 

What is wrong with doing drawdown with Royal London?

dunstonh

Spivo46 said:

With 350k to invest in a pension drawdown at 64 who should i choose? Currently with Royal London and in Governed portfolio 4. 

What is wrong with Royal London? They are the biggest provider of drawdown in the UK.

What is your definition of best?  As an IFA, I have access to very many providers and I cannot tell you which is best as it will vary with each individual.    

Spivo46

Albermarle said:

Spivo46 said:

With 350k to invest in a pension drawdown at 64 who should i choose? Currently with Royal London and in Governed portfolio 4. 

What is wrong with doing drawdown with Royal London?

Thank you all for responding. As a novice (and i am not alone)! i am looking for some reassurance that i am not missing out on some "once in a lifetime opportunity". With so much promotional stuff in our face it is confusing. I am not stupid and it doesn't seem right that we all get to a point in our lives when we have not been programmed or educated in preparation for retirement or need to pay inflated fees for a financial planner

xylophone

 I am not stupid and it doesn't seem right that we all get to a point in our lives when we have not been programmed or educated in preparation for retirement or need to pay inflated fees for a financial planner

It's somewhat like other tasks for which we have not been programmed (!) or educated - where we realise there is a deficiency, we either read up, go to evening classes or (where unavoidable) pay the piper?

Below might be a start.

https://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/

Would you wish to book an appointment with Pension Wise for a free chat and guidance session?

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pension-wise

https://www.financial-expert.co.uk/best-retirement-planning-books-uk/

dunstonh

. I am not stupid and it doesn't seem right that we all get to a point in our lives when we have not been programmed or educated in preparation for retirement or need to pay inflated fees for a financial planner

Do you have a car?  Have you been educated to be able to service it yourself?
Do you have a boiler? Have you been educated to be able to service it yourself?

This is no different to every other task in life.  you either learn or you get someone else to do it.   Whether you decide to learn or not is a personal choice.    

Albermarle

This is no different to every other task in life.  you either learn or you get someone else to do it. 

Third option is not to learn, but blunder on regardless. I am sure when it comes to DIY tasks around the home, we have all done that , and plenty do that with their finances also. 

robatwork

Good analogies - and like car mechanics, and heating engineers, there are great ones, good ones, and rogues in the financial advice arena. Bad advice could cost you more than a new boiler or a blown big end though. 

I'm no mechanic or heating engineer but can refill the air bubble in my megaflo and do basic car maintenance - self taught. I also don't trust myself or even https://www.unbiased.co.uk/ to find me someone who can choose my financial future better than myself so have spent a little time and a few books getting up to speed. You're "not stupid" - your words, and after all, who is more interested in your financial future than yourself? So learn yourself, just spending time reading every thread on the first few pages of this forum would be a great start. 

xylophone

With regard to tasks about the home, slapping on a coat of paint is one thing - fiddling about with the gas boiler or electrical circuits quite another.......

As for finances, there is not much to go wrong when you shove a few thousand into a building society - there's the inflation loss to consider but the capital is there.

Throwing your life savings into shares in Snake Oil Inc though.........

gm0

This is the eternal unsolvable argument about advice. 

How to find the "good version".  If you simply prefer not to spend time on learning and executing DIY then that is what you need to do instead.  A different task.  But still requiring effort and some diligence to secure.  And then understand the advice you have been given (albeit only sufficiently to engage with it properly not to replicate it).

And yet advice (in my experience at least) is routinely "sold" not on task outsourcing a signpost to a suitable risk level investment and competent admin thereafter but on an implicit "expectation" of "better returns" and financial outcome for the consumer because it is being done "professionally".  People turn up here all the time after believing that and subsequently not feeling the value in net fees returns. The happy ones don't come of course.

Nearly all wealth management marketing and a good slice of adviser sales does some version of this. 
The contract and fine print will clearly say that it doesn't gurantee performance.  And yet the sale still proceeds on setting the expectation that wealth managed/advised = better.  People fall for this all the time having trusted the nice salesperson and failed to read the tiny print carefully.  And are then surprised when the "suitable" portfolio dips and further surprised that the fund house or the adviser didn't review the portfolio instantly enough continuously to save them from said volatility dips.  Because that isn't what they bought but it was what they thought they were getting.

Platform and fund management costs overlap so much it is possible to argue for a DIY cheaper or adviser discounted cheaper and offsetting part of advice cost @0.5% position - you just vary the portfolio to an example which fits the chosen narrative the best.  So that doesn't distinguish the options.  Call it even. 

Taking platform and fund management as a wash.  For similar assets.  DIY is of course cheaper by advice cost and initial charge.  10-12% of initial pot value viewed over 40 years. (1-2% up front and 0.5% pa, depletion).  Or a lot more for FA/Wealth management, DFMs etc.  And with similar assets that will be the net fees outperformance of DIY on similar assets. 
The advised portfolio has to be varied to deliver at least the advice charge in extra returns to break even.  Which it may do.  Though it may well take more speculative investment risk in deviating the portfolio along an efficent frontier towards higher potential returns at higher risk.  A risk which the consumer is taking not the adviser. Although the customer is not paid for taking it.

Construction analogies are an odd choice given how good most self build is - care in design and execution of detail. And how commonly ropy the outsourced by professional developers and their endless sub-contractor chain where the quickly covered up drives out any pretence of referral to plan or of attention to quality in detailing.  Highstreet financial advice and adviser introduced platforms are less routinely rubbish and brazen about it than the big housing developers.