Work place pension to SIPP

heytoki

Hello all,

i currently have my pension with Aviva where my employer pays monthly into it. I am thinking to move the pension to a SIPP as i dont really like the choices i have with Aviva. My pension is currently invested in 3 funds.
Can i transfer the pension to a SIPP of my choice? if so, what happens with the 3 funds i have with Aviva? are they sold and then the cash is transferred to the SIPP? what are the costs associated with the transfer?
Any other things to consider?
Thanks

ColdIron

heytoki said:

Any other things to consider?

Will your employer contribute to a SIPP? Most won't due to the admin overhead

heytoki

My employer will not contribute to the new SIPP. So the monthly payments will keep going to Aviva so i was thinking to do the following transfers once a year

Albermarle

heytoki said:

My employer will not contribute to the new SIPP. So the monthly payments will keep going to Aviva so i was thinking to do the following transfers once a year

If you empty the Aviva pension, their system might close it down. On the other hand they not allow out partial transfers. You need to check carefully with them first before doing anything.

what happens with the 3 funds i have with Aviva? are they sold and then the cash is transferred to the SIPP? what are the costs associated with the transfer?

The Aviva funds will not be available in a SIPP, so when you arrange the transfer via the SIPP provider, Aviva will sell the funds and send a cash payment to the SIPP provider. There should be no costs involved.

LHW99

I believe you sometimes have to opt out of an auto enrollment pension before transferring, and then opt in again afterwards, which would mean you would lose a number of months of employer contributions.

How old are you? If you are likely to move to another job in a few years, you could do the transfer then. Aviva won't give a lot of choices (probably most of the people using them won't look at what funds they are in), but if you are in the "default fund" you could look at what any other funds offer and transfer within the pension.

Quorden

I did similar thing last year for the same reasons, company pension was managed by Mercer and firstly got confirmation from them that they'd allow full or partial transfers of the then current value, also that my monthly contributions would carry on regardless, which they did.

Only hiccup was that I didn't have an individual policy number which made it a little more troublesome to fill out transfer requests on a number of SIPP platforms where that information is mandatory, but ended up with HL.

I'd suggest first step would be to check with Aviva that you're able to the transfer and that your regular contributions would continue as before.