Moving to Aviva or Scottish Widows?

BlackCoffee5

Hi everyone,

I am struggling to wrap my head around the complexity of UK pensions. Being French doesn’t help either as everything seems quite different (and having spent most of my professional life in the UK, I don’t even fully know how French pensions work either 🤷🏻‍♀️).

I’ve lived and worked in the UK for a few years. As a result, I have 2 workplace pension pots – one with Aviva where I have a little over 14k, and another one with Scottish Widows where I have a little over 3k. I am trying to decide if I should move the Aviva funds to the SW pot or the other way around and I am absolutely lost.

I have now moved out of the UK – not sure if this is permanent or if I’ll come back in a few years, but that’s at least long term, so I’m not adding to either pension pots anymore at this time and for the foreseeable future.
I have a Lloyds bank account which I have kept, so I can see the SW pot rise and fall on the home screen of my banking app – also not sure if that should have any incidence on my decision (?) as I can see the Aviva funds on the Aviva app, so it’s not as if I was blind to one or the other.

Is there one pension provider better than the other? What exactly should I look at to make my decision? Please tell me in simple terms as if you were explaining it to a 5-year-old (that’s how lost I am). 😅
i am pretty clear on the process of moving one pot to the other, but I’m more looking for advice on how to decide which provider I should keep.

Thanks in advance!

Marcon

BlackCoffee5 said:

Hi everyone,

I am struggling to wrap my head around the complexity of UK pensions. Being French doesn’t help either as everything seems quite different (and having spent most of my professional life in the UK, I don’t even fully know how French pensions work either 🤷🏻‍♀️).

I’ve lived and worked in the UK for a few years. As a result, I have 2 workplace pension pots – one with Aviva where I have a little over 14k, and another one with Scottish Widows where I have a little over 3k. I am trying to decide if I should move the Aviva funds to the SW pot or the other way around and I am absolutely lost.

I have now moved out of the UK – not sure if this is permanent or if I’ll come back in a few years, but that’s at least long term, so I’m not adding to either pension pots anymore at this time and for the foreseeable future.
I have a Lloyds bank account which I have kept, so I can see the SW pot rise and fall on the home screen of my banking app – also not sure if that should have any incidence on my decision (?) as I can see the Aviva funds on the Aviva app, so it’s not as if I was blind to one or the other.

Is there one pension provider better than the other? What exactly should I look at to make my decision? Please tell me in simple terms as if you were explaining it to a 5-year-old (that’s how lost I am). 😅
i am pretty clear on the process of moving one pot to the other, but I’m more looking for advice on how to decide which provider I should keep.

Thanks in advance!

It's not so much the pension itself as the underlying funds in which you've chosen (or not chosen, if you've simply opted for the 'default' position) which you need to look at.

What are the relative charges? Never a bad starting point, given that past fund performance is not a guarantee of future performance, so that's not always as helpful an indicator as one might hope!

Other than administrative ease, it probably doesn't matter much whether you keep them separate of transfer one into the other - the amounts aren't huge (especially the SW pot), so the impact wouldn't be huge either.

Of greater interest is how you would access these pensions at the point you want to draw the funds, if you are living outside the UK at the time.

dunstonh

I’ve lived and worked in the UK for a few years. As a result, I have 2 workplace pension pots – one with Aviva where I have a little over 14k, and another one with Scottish Widows where I have a little over 3k. I am trying to decide if I should move the Aviva funds to the SW pot or the other way around and I am absolutely lost.

Its possible you may not be able to.   If you are resident in the EU, UK financial firms are not able to offer UK financial services to you.      Top ups to existing plans has some flexibility but if your plans are not current version (i.e. legacy plans no longer available) then you may not be able to top up those.   Given the very small amounts, it may be better to leave them where they are.

Is there one pension provider better than the other?

They have had thousands of pension versions over the years.   So, without knowing your versions, we cannot say.   Both of their modern platforms are whole of market and both use FNZ as the software provider.    So, if we were looking at their modern plans, there is very little difference.