Moving funds from AEGON to II

Sanxxx

A couple of months ago I posted regarding terminating my IFA due to increased costs, subsequently I did so.

Since then I've been researching my future choice of funds and platform. In summary I'm going for an 80:20 Equity/Bond split consisting of 2 Passive Funds and 2 Bond Funds.

My current investments with AEGON, which were DFM managed, are split across 25 Funds none of which are my future choices.

In order to transfer to II i can either do an 'in specie' or 'cash' transfer and I'm trying to work out which is the better option.

Cash seems simpler on the face of it, however I'll be out the market for an indeterminate length of time with the associated risk.

If I do an 'in specie' transfer , it will take longer, some funds will be unavailable on II and need to be cash converted anyway, and once on the II platform I'll need to sell/buy to get into my chosen funds however my time out the market should be less.

Anyone with similar transfer experiences?

Peter314

Sanxxx said:

A couple of months ago I posted regarding terminating my IFA due to increased costs, subsequently I did so.

Bit drastic. Could you not have just switched to a low cost platform 🙂

Pat38493

Sanxxx said:

A couple of months ago I posted regarding terminating my IFA due to increased costs, subsequently I did so.

Since then I've been researching my future choice of funds and platform. In summary I'm going for an 80:20 Equity/Bond split consisting of 2 Passive Funds and 2 Bond Funds.

My current investments with AEGON, which were DFM managed, are split across 25 Funds none of which are my future choices.

In order to transfer to II i can either do an 'in specie' or 'cash' transfer and I'm trying to work out which is the better option.

Cash seems simpler on the face of it, however I'll be out the market for an indeterminate length of time with the associated risk.

If I do an 'in specie' transfer , it will take longer, some funds will be unavailable on II and need to be cash converted anyway, and once on the II platform I'll need to sell/buy to get into my chosen funds however my time out the market should be less.

Anyone with similar transfer experiences?

If you don't have any particular deadline for accessing the funds, probably the best approach is to move the funds to the future fund choices within Aegon, and then do an in specie transfer - that way you will be out of market for less time in total, but the full transfer timeline will be longer.

This of course assumes that your future fund choices are available on Aegon.

My guess is that if you try to do an in specie transfer of 25 funds this could take even a lot longer, even if all 25 are available on II.

When I did a transfer like this I just did it in cash and took the risk of being out of market for a week or so.

westv

Peter314 said:

Sanxxx said:

A couple of months ago I posted regarding terminating my IFA due to increased costs, subsequently I did so.

Bit drastic. Could you not have just switched to a low cost platform 🙂

    

Albermarle

Sanxxx said:

A couple of months ago I posted regarding terminating my IFA due to increased costs, subsequently I did so.

Since then I've been researching my future choice of funds and platform. In summary I'm going for an 80:20 Equity/Bond split consisting of 2 Passive Funds and 2 Bond Funds.

My current investments with AEGON, which were DFM managed, are split across 25 Funds none of which are my future choices.

In order to transfer to II i can either do an 'in specie' or 'cash' transfer and I'm trying to work out which is the better option.

Cash seems simpler on the face of it, however I'll be out the market for an indeterminate length of time with the associated risk.

If I do an 'in specie' transfer , it will take longer, some funds will be unavailable on II and need to be cash converted anyway, and once on the II platform I'll need to sell/buy to get into my chosen funds however my time out the market should be less.

Anyone with similar transfer experiences?

If any of the funds are Aegon funds then probably they will not be available on II.

If you do a cash transfer, then it should take maximum 3 weeks, but you will not be out of the market for most of that time. Maybe a week ? 
Some pension cash transfers are done within less than a week, so you might be out of the market only for a couple of days.
Another possibility is to slim down the 25 funds to a smaller number before transfer.

FlimFlam01

FYI - I did a pension transfer from Aegon to Vanguard a few months ago - it took ages for the money to appear in my Vanguard account.

I also did a transfer from Royal London to Vanguard and it took a few days.

In summary, Aegon seem to take ages to do absolutely anything, which is one of the reasons I transferred out as it was all a bit 1980's in they way they seem to work.

Albermarle

FlimFlam01 said:

FYI - I did a pension transfer from Aegon to Vanguard a few months ago - it took ages for the money to appear in my Vanguard account.

I also did a transfer from Royal London to Vanguard and it took a few days.

In summary, Aegon seem to take ages to do absolutely anything, which is one of the reasons I transferred out as it was all a bit 1980's in they way they seem to work.

Although in the interests of fair play, there have been quite a few posts recently complaining about Vanguard being very slow !

infj

I did the exact same thing about 6 months ago. I did in specie. It took about 6 weeks to transfer most but for some reason 2 got "stuck" and I eventually had to write a letter of complaint to Aegon about those. They magically then turned up 🤣

dunstonh

In summary, Aegon seem to take ages to do absolutely anything, which is one of the reasons I transferred out as it was all a bit 1980's in they way they seem to work.

Which Aegon?  - they have about 4 different locations which do not talk to each other as they are independent distribution channels and you have to make sure you pick the right one via Origo.  Otherwise it goes back and forth with failures and redirects.  Each rejection would require the receiving scheme to take action and delays could be down to the receiving scheme rather than ceding scheme.