Utmost Performance and advice on how to save my Pension Pot.

JohnWinder

Yes, we are down into the weeds. As long as someone who needs to understand these cost comparisons does, even if it’s not me. I gave a comparison of fund management charges, this was rightly added to with necessary other costs, for a real comparison. But if we really want to compare them, the Utmost fund fee is 0.58%/year, as I only compared management costs. So we might now be looking at 0.21% vs 0.51% or 0.58% for Utmost. If that’s apples vs apples, even if you should eat fruit salad, one apple is much better priced. 
And yes again, it’s a lot more than cost for the OP which is why I guided her to Robin Powell’s new book to be understood before making any change.

Albermarle

JohnWinder said:

Yes, we are down into the weeds. As long as someone who needs to understand these cost comparisons does, even if it’s not me. I gave a comparison of fund management charges, this was rightly added to with necessary other costs, for a real comparison. But if we really want to compare them, the Utmost fund fee is 0.58%/year, as I only compared management costs. So we might now be looking at 0.21% vs 0.51% or 0.58% for Utmost. If that’s apples vs apples, even if you should eat fruit salad, one apple is much better priced. 
And yes again, it’s a lot more than cost for the OP which is why I guided her to Robin Powell’s new book to be understood before making any change.

Probably not a lot of  point comparing money market funds, or even index trackers.  Most regular pension savers will be in some kind of multi asset fund, so best to compare those .
Utmost - 0.75%
Large traditional UK pension provider - 0.4% to 1% depending on discounts, size of pot etc
Vanguard - 0.37%
HL - biggest SIPP provider - 0.65%
II second/third biggest SIPP provider - 0.3% ( for large amounts ) 

So they do look a bit on the high side, but not dramatically though.

MrDidz

Thanks for your advice, everyone.

I'd like to say it had been helpful but if anything I am now even more confused.  reading between the lines it sounds like somehow this is all my fault for making bad investments even though I have never been asked what I wanted Utmost to invest my money in other than whether I wanted them to stick to Low, Medium or High risk options.

Obviously, if I took my money out of their hands and decided to invest in PaddyPower and lost it then that would be my fault.  But at least I would know why and where it went.

The idea of transferring it to someone else to look after is a great idea, but would only be worthy of consideration if I knew someone reliable to transfer it to and unfortunately, I haven't a clue.  So, I'm flying blind and still haven't a clue what to do.

My gut feeling is that I will be better off getting my money back and putting it in a savings account.  Even at 0% interest it will do better than it is at the moment with Utmost.

dunstonh

 reading between the lines it sounds like somehow this is all my fault for making bad investments even though I have never been asked what I wanted 

You haven't made bad investments.  Utmost offer mainstream investment funds.  Pretty middle of the road stuff. Their fund have returned gains/losses in line with expectation.

I have never been asked what I wanted Utmost to invest my money in other than whether I wanted them to stick to Low, Medium or High risk options.

And that is pretty much your only choices with them.     

The idea of transferring it to someone else to look after is a great idea, but would only be worthy of consideration if I knew someone reliable to transfer it to and unfortunately, I haven't a clue.  So, I'm flying blind and still haven't a clue what to do.

That is a red herring to your issue and I was wary of that particular strand of discussion blinding you to the real problem.

If you were invested elsewhere at the same risk level then you would have suffered similar losses over 2022.  The provider isn't the issue here.

My gut feeling is that I will be better off getting my money back and putting it in a savings account.  Even at 0% interest it will do better than it is at the moment with Utmost.

That is the wrong thing to do and you are wrong in your feelings.  

Investments have negative years as well as positive years.    Eq Life WP fund also had these negatives.  The fact you missed them is more likely down to you not seeing them because you were not looking.  Also, the losses that occurs on WP funds is in the final bonus and Eq Life never included the final bonus in their current values.  Just their transfer values.   This gave the impression that the current value was stable.  Whereas the transfer value would go up and down all the time (albeit in an upward trend).

You are looking at your value directly after a major negative year.  Hence why it fell. Its not Utmost.  Everybody lost in 2022.      Negative years occur with an average around 1 in 5 years.   You don't make silly decisions to move to cash after a negative year.  You just average the negative and positive years out.

Albermarle

I have reread the thread and nobody accused you of making bad investments.

Utmost have a very limited choice and you picked a mixture  of medium and low risk. You have been a bit unlucky as normally lower risk investments performed unusually badly in 2022, as explained in my previous post below.

So called low risk, low return investments normally have a high % of government bonds in them.

Normally these tick along and are usually quite stable, although without much growth. For the last few years they have been doing better than usual due to the general low interest rate environment we have had since 2008 ( there is a link between bond performance and interest rates). As interest rates rose in 2022, this reversed the situation and decimated the value of these bonds.

So  'low risk' investments have been not a good place to be recently and you are not the first poster by far to be asking similar questions. However as Dunstonh has said you would not have expected negative figures for the whole of the last 4 years.

You can of course move to another provider, and another provider will probably have a larger range of investments and probably slightly cheaper charges. However do not be under any illusion that any investments there will suddenly perform a lot better than the ones you have now. They might go up if markets pick up, but so will the Utmost ones.

My gut feeling is that I will be better off getting my money back and putting it in a savings account.  Even at 0% interest it will do better than it is at the moment with Utmost.

That might be the case now, but if investment performance improves over the next years, you will regret missing out on this gain. The problem is always you never know what the best course of action is until afterwards.

MrDidz

Dazed_and_C0nfused said:

Why not simply move it to another provider?  Or does it have safeguarded benefits?

Don't forget though that in general the provider doesn't determine the performance, your investment choices do.

The short answer is I don't know.

But I do know that I don;t know which is one reason I'm seeking help.  Moving the money from one provider to another seems somewhat risky if you have no idea who can be trusted.

As for my investment choices I have no idea as far as I recall nobody has ever asked me to make any investment choices and the statements provided by Utmost give me no information on where my money has been invested.

All I get is an Annual Statement.

• 7/3/2020 Fund Value £57,740.03
• 1/4/2022 Fund Value £54,943.55
• 1/4/2023 Fund Value £51,053.26 

I seem to be missing the statement for 2021, but I'll add if I find it.  All they say is that its a Multi-Asset Cautious (IBAS) Fund with Low to Medium Level of Risk   Annual Management Charge for losing my money is £383.45 with expenses of £169.17 for their investment mismanagement and that's about it.  

That's all I know.  I mean basically I never even chose Utmost to manage my fund that choice was made by Equitable Life.

dunstonh

I seem to be missing the statement for 2021, but I'll add if I find it.  All they say is that its a Multi-Asset Cautious (IBAS) Fund with Low to Medium Level of Risk   Annual Management Charge for losing my money is £383.45 with expenses of £169.17 for their investment mismanagement and that's about it.  

Please read the responses on this thread as you don't seem to be getting it. There has been no investment mismanagement.

 I mean basically I never even chose Utmost to manage my fund that choice was made by Equitable Life.

You were free to move from Utmost at any time and you confirmed you did make the investment choice (which is just risk profile in the case of utmost)

All I get is an Annual Statement.
7/3/2020 Fund Value £57,740.031/4/2022 Fund Value £54,943.551/4/2023 Fund Value £51,053.26 

• 
  

What happened to 2021 statement?  Probably in the £60k range
March 2020 was about half way through the coronavirus falls between 23 Feb and 23 March. That recovered in around 6 months and 2020 ended the year up
April 22 was 3 months after the initial falls of late 2021/early 2022.
April 23 would have the falls until their october 2022 low point but would have gone up after that but not recorded to the Nov 21 peak.

MrDidz

Albermarle said:

I have reread the thread and nobody accused you of making bad investments.

The point is that at the moment I have no control at all over where my money is invested.  In fact, at the moment I don;t even know how it has been inversed.  So, I'm not sure how I can be blamed for making poor investments.

Albermarle

As for my investment choices I have no idea as far as I recall nobody has ever asked me to make any investment choices

 Seems to be some confusion here ,as you said in your first post , this is despite being limited to Low and Medium Risk investments by my instructions, 

All they say is that its a Multi-Asset Cautious (IBAS) Fund with Low to Medium Level of Risk  . So looking at their website, here are the details.
Multi-asset funds (heritage Equitable Life) (utmost.co.uk)

Like all lower risk funds it is heavy in bonds, which has caused the poor performance of all these types of funds, as explained in my last post.

• 7/3/2020 Fund Value £57,740.03
• 1/4/2022 Fund Value £54,943.55
• 1/4/2023 Fund Value £51,053.26 

When you find the 2021 statement, almost certainly it will be higher than 2020. So it has not gone down for four years, which did not sound correct, but it will have taken a big hit in 2022, starting on Jan 1st, due mainly to this bonds issue. 

MrDidz

dunstonh said:
What happened to 2021 statement?  Probably in the £60k range

I have no idea.  If I find it I'll let you know.  But by 2022 the fund was down £2,796.48 and that was after a £10.78 profit for that year. So, Im guessing the 2021 statement showed a £2,807.26 loss.

The main thing is that over the period since Utmost took over my fund it has consistently lost value and i don;t know whether to cut my losses or not..

That might be the case now, but if investment performance improves over the next years, you will regret missing out on this gain. The problem is always you never know what the best course of action is until afterwards.

Very true! But I'm just wondering if I could do any worse.  I would have made more money if I had put it in a savings account.  But now I'm actually retired I'm supposed to be living on this money not watching it dwindle away.