Standard Life Pension S226 with Profits

drawit998

If any body has any advice or personal dealings with standard life and can give me advice that would be great.

My S226 with profits has be going since the early 1980's, I rang them to discuss possibly transferring it to a drawdown pot, either them or someone else. My first question was to do with the + profits part, I was told that my S226 was running at -1875(minus) profits. I didn't clarify if that was % or pounds, without any discussion, I was moved to another department of standard life, the claims department, where they started to discuss moving my pot to another type of pension investment so I would be able to draw down from the pension. This was all too quick for me, I want to know whether I can take this to the Financial Services, I cant believe that after 40 years there is no profits on the policy.

thanks

Marcon

drawit998 said:

If any body has any advice or personal dealings with standard life and can give me advice that would be great.

My S226 with profits has be going since the early 1980's, I rang them to discuss possibly transferring it to a drawdown pot, either them or someone else. My first question was to do with the + profits part, I was told that my S226 was running at -1875(minus) profits. I didn't clarify if that was % or pounds, without any discussion, I was moved to another department of standard life, the claims department, where they started to discuss moving my pot to another type of pension investment so I would be able to draw down from the pension. This was all too quick for me, I want to know whether I can take this to the Financial Services, I cant believe that after 40 years there is no profits on the policy.

thanks

Take what to Financial Services (presumably you mean FOS)? There has to be some sort of breach of conditions, poor advice or similar, not just a policy which (you believe) hasn't performed well.

Have you been regularly reviewing the performance of your policy? Do you actually have any clear information about it/understand where things stand now? From your post it seems you may not, so possibly asking them to confirm the facts in writing is your next step.

dunstonh

If any body has any advice or personal dealings with standard life and can give me advice that would be great.

Nothing you read here is advice.  It is just discussion and opinion.

 This was all too quick for me, I want to know whether I can take this to the Financial Services, I cant believe that after 40 years there is no profits on the policy.

Marcon has already commented on your confusing terminology.  However, yes, you could have no profits on the policy.

a) if you paid the bulk of the money into the investment before the dot.com crash when it was a high equity/low bonds fund but little or nothing after that when it switched to low equity/high bonds, then you could be negative.  WP funds were pretty much forced to cover liabilities as a priority rather than target investment returns.   
b) if you have safeguarded benefits, such as a guaranteed annuity rate or guaranteed minimum fund value then these are where your value is.  Not the fund value.  Plans with quality safeguarded benefits tend to have little or no growth on the annual bonus.
c) some of SL's WP funds have a guaranteed minimum growth rate of 4% p.a. That isn't a safeguarded benefit but on plans that have some or all allocated to that, again the value is in the guarantee.
d) if there is an MVR (which could be from your wording), then these usually don't apply at the scheme retirement age but will apply if you transfer away from them before scheme retirement age.
e) if yours is a older S226 then these had a guaranteed basic sum assured and the returns don't work in the same way modern plans would.   Again, the value is in the guaranteed element but that is reduced if you take the plan early.

If you mean FOS, then no you cannot take it to the FOS.   You have to use the complaint process of the firm first and wait for them before having access to the FOS.
If you want Standard Life to provide you with advice, then that is not within their regulatory remit.  So, any complaint that is about them failing to give advice or opinion will fail as they cannot give you what you are asking for.

sandsy

You need to find out more about your contract and how it works before transferring. Otherwise you're at risk of losing valuable benefits you didn't know you had. Do you have any of the original documentation - that might be a starting point for finding out more. Call up again and ask them to talk you through how your policy works. Ask if you'd be losing any value if you transferred it now - that you might not lose if you kept it running until the original retirement date on the contract.

 Even though Standard Life cannot give advice they can give you factual information, and they need to give you enough of it so that you don't make a bad decision if more information could have prevented that.

Whizzer17

I too have a S226  (Retirement Annuity Contract) pension, started in 1987, with Clerical Medical which matures in November this year. This does have a guarrentee to increase by 4% yearly so I would expect yours to as well.

There is a MVR of £5K. (Market Value Reduction) but I'll wait, thanks. There is not benifits/guarentees with mine.

You should be receiving yearly updates from Standard Life giving you the value of your pension and its performance or can you not go on line and see the funds performance when you know which funds you are in.

Here's mine.

Clerical Medical With Profits Regular Pay Pension Fund

GB0002038981:GBP

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• Price (GBP)7.80
• Today's Change0.001 / 0.01%
• 1 Year change+3.96%

One thing to find out is that tax relief is being added to your contributions...mine wasn't. I did not find this out until 12 years ago, so missed out on 20 years relief. The kind Taxman lets you claim 5 years back from the date you find out and will send you payment. ( I had an accountant then ). Going forward from then you add your contributions on your self assessment to get the relief added to your basic tax code.

I started a proper DC pesion years ago and just kept this pension ticking over as a back up.

DRS1

drawit998 said:

 I was moved to another department of standard life, the claims department, where they started to discuss moving my pot to another type of pension investment so I would be able to draw down from the pension. 

The point here is that a section 226 policy is so old it does not support "drawdown".
But as others have said you want to know if there are guarantees you would lose if you moved the pension monies into some modern thing which did support it.  If you did have guarantees attached to your 226 policy then I would expect Standard Life to make that very clear to you before they let you transfer the money to something else which did not have the guarantees.