Looking to consolidate my pension funds

LHW99

DavidT67 said:

dunstonh said:

LHW99 said:

I run my own business

Is it a Limited Co? If so, the company can make payments to your pension, and it comes off any corporation tax due.

Which is important as I believe (only from past comments here) that Vanguard platform doesn't accept company contributions.

Vanguard Investor UK platform will accept payments for the controlling directors of a private limited company after some initial setup steps.  They don't accept employer contributions for non-directors.

https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/what-we-offer/personal-pension/self-employed?query=employer contribution

Interactive Investor also accepts contributions from companies (don't think you necessarily have to be a director) of ad hoc amounts.

You need to fill in a form (downloadable pdf) for each contribution, which can then be sent by secure message. We used to do that when running a limited Co, and as its profit level was fairly low, used to wait until year end, and make single one-off contributions, which could be as low as £1k if necessary. I believe II will accept even a few hundred.

You should be able to access any Vanguard fund from them, as well as a wide range of other providers' funds / ITs / ETFs.

They are fixed fee, which is expensive for a few thousand, but successively cheaper after that. You get one free trade per month with their lowest price offer.

blinko

Hi thanks a lot everyone for coming back to me, would the interactive investor platform be good for a cheap long-term invest and forget solution.

DeLaSole

blinko said:

Hi thanks a lot everyone for coming back to me, would the interactive investor platform be good for a cheap long-term invest and forget solution.

Hi blinko,

ii is a fixed-fee platform so you would be paying >2% just for platform fees alone on a combined pot of £7.5k.

Someone may confirm whether or not iweb might currently be a good shout for you but other than that, %-fee platforms (inc. Vanguard, Fidelity, HL) should be in the range of 0.15%-0.45% and therefore more suited to smaller pots.

Best wishes.

*edit: from what I can make out, iweb charge a fixed fee for holding a Sipp and would not be a good option foe you currently... it was their ISA which was as low as a £5 buy charge and £0 for holding.

QrizB

DeLaSole said:

Someone may confirm whether or not iweb might currently be a good shout for you

I've recently moved my SSISA from ii to iWeb. It was smooth and painless.

LHW99

blinko said:

Hi thanks a lot everyone for coming back to me, would the interactive investor platform be good for a cheap long-term invest and forget solution.

As confirmed by DeLaSole, II is good for larger amounts. You could consider that in two ways - a) I will invest at iWeb / HL / ... until I have abigger pot, and then look to see where may be cheaper, or b) I plan to put in several tens of £k over the next couple of years (hopefully) so for invest and forget maybe make a choice of fixed fee now, and leave it alone till near retirement.

Depends how much you actually want to have to deal with your SIPP over the years (still not a good idea to completely forget about it though).

And remember, whichever platform (HL, AJBell, iWeb etc) you choose, that is just the "tin", its the funds etc you choose to put in it that do the performing, be it a Vanguard LS, another global fund / tracker or some combination of active funds etc.

blinko

thanks for the thoughts guys, its a good point re making some contributions the less money I have hanging around the less I'd be inclined to spend it on something silly and with the time line I have 20 years odd would be good.

I'm very hands off in terms of time I'd like to spend on it, invest and forget for me please

blinko

Hi all, just wanted to say thank you for your help I have transferred my existing pensions to AJ Bell quite cheap just 0.25% annual fee

blinko

hi all just to update I have had to liquidate my transfer to move them to AJ bell, they should be all completed within a month and then I'll be looking to choose maybe a vanguard fund