Consolidation ahoy, but some questions occur about Interactive Investor and Vanguard

bluegreendeployment

Hello all.  New to the forum.

Ahead of starting to use my pension to fund my proposed lavish retirement lifestyle of visiting tea shops when there's a pensioner's special deal on, I'm looking to find the 'best' SIPP to eventually consolidate 4 DC pots into (totalling around £600k).  Using flexi-access drawdown with regular (monthly / quarterly) withdrawals is the intention, some time in the next 5 years.

I've been taking my time to just read around the subject / forums / etc.  Doing this has answered many questions, so thanks to forumites here for this wealth of info.

Starting at the bottom, cost-wide, for me, would be an Interactive Investor (II) SIPP.  One thing I've read is that the II SIPP interface provides no way to see the value of your pension on any day except today.  If true, this seems a big oversight, since it's very handy to just dip in occasionally to see how things are doing.  Part of this process is looking at a graph or copying monthly / quarterly figures to a spreadsheet.

Vanguard are next cheapest.  I am aware they offer just their own funds, so that information would be part of the decision-making process.  My smallest DC pot is actually with them already, so I am more familiar with them.

Anyone any thoughts on II and Vanguard as SIPP destinations?  I'm targeting a smooth flexi-access drawdown experience, with a nice UI that can clearly show current and historical valuations, and also the 'still in your pension' vs. 'moved to drawdown' figures.

Many thanks for reading this.  A

MallyGirl

bluegreendeployment said:

Hello all.  New to the forum.

Ahead of starting to use my pension to fund my proposed lavish retirement lifestyle of visiting tea shops when there's a pensioner's special deal on, I'm looking to find the 'best' SIPP to eventually consolidate 4 DC pots into (totalling around £600k).  Using flexi-access drawdown with regular (monthly / quarterly) withdrawals is the intention, some time in the next 5 years.

I've been taking my time to just read around the subject / forums / etc.  Doing this has answered many questions, so thanks to forumites here for this wealth of info.

Starting at the bottom, cost-wide, for me, would be an Interactive Investor (II) SIPP.  One thing I've read is that the II SIPP interface provides no way to see the value of your pension on any day except today.  If true, this seems a big oversight, since it's very handy to just dip in occasionally to see how things are doing.  Part of this process is looking at a graph or copying monthly / quarterly figures to a spreadsheet.
{not true - you can click on any fund you hold, or are watching, and see a graph of prices over time}

Vanguard are next cheapest.  I am aware they offer just their own funds, so that information would be part of the decision-making process.  My smallest DC pot is actually with them already, so I am more familiar with them.

Anyone any thoughts on II and Vanguard as SIPP destinations?  I'm targeting a smooth flexi-access drawdown experience, with a nice UI that can clearly show current and historical valuations, and also the 'still in your pension' vs. 'moved to drawdown' figures.

Many thanks for reading this.  A

I believe that ii is less friendly with respect to differentiating between crystallised and uncrystallised funds but I haven't reached that point myself yet

bjorn_toby_wilde

MallyGirl said:

bluegreendeployment said:

Hello all.  New to the forum.

Ahead of starting to use my pension to fund my proposed lavish retirement lifestyle of visiting tea shops when there's a pensioner's special deal on, I'm looking to find the 'best' SIPP to eventually consolidate 4 DC pots into (totalling around £600k).  Using flexi-access drawdown with regular (monthly / quarterly) withdrawals is the intention, some time in the next 5 years.

I've been taking my time to just read around the subject / forums / etc.  Doing this has answered many questions, so thanks to forumites here for this wealth of info.

Starting at the bottom, cost-wide, for me, would be an Interactive Investor (II) SIPP.  One thing I've read is that the II SIPP interface provides no way to see the value of your pension on any day except today.  If true, this seems a big oversight, since it's very handy to just dip in occasionally to see how things are doing.  Part of this process is looking at a graph or copying monthly / quarterly figures to a spreadsheet.
{not true - you can click on any fund you hold, or are watching, and see a graph of prices over time}

Vanguard are next cheapest.  I am aware they offer just their own funds, so that information would be part of the decision-making process.  My smallest DC pot is actually with them already, so I am more familiar with them.

Anyone any thoughts on II and Vanguard as SIPP destinations?  I'm targeting a smooth flexi-access drawdown experience, with a nice UI that can clearly show current and historical valuations, and also the 'still in your pension' vs. 'moved to drawdown' figures.

Many thanks for reading this.  A

I believe that ii is less friendly with respect to differentiating between crystallised and uncrystallised funds but I haven't reached that point myself yet

Whilst it’s true you can see prices of individual funds, I think the OP is referring to not being able to see the overall performance of your total investment.

I don’t know about II but that’s something I can see on my Aviva pension website and my Vanguard ISA. My AJ Bell pension doesn’t show it though.

bluegreendeployment

Yep, I'm after confirmation whether it's possible in II to see my whole pension's historical performance. I can do so with Vanguard, Aviva and Aegon.

cfw1994

bluegreendeployment said:

Yep, I'm after confirmation whether it's possible in II to see my whole pension's historical performance. I can do so with Vanguard, Aviva and Aegon.

You’re doing better than me with my Aviva “New Gen Pension Plan” then - I can chose to see what the value was on any date I chose, but there are no graphing mechanisms I can see 🧐 🤷‍♂️

That said, I’m 4 years into retirement….so I keep a monthly track of all our funds on my own spreadsheet 🤓

Funding those tea stops is important, & we absolutely love a deal - even discovered the Morrisons Over-60 £5 breakfast was a reasonable deal, unlimited hot drinks 🤪

Good luck!

ali_bear

Yes I think you need your own spreadsheet to track monthly your overall situation. Cash at hand, DC fund values, other pots ..

LHW99

You can get an "analysis report" with II.

There is a button (Analyse my Portfolio - used to be at the top right of the list of investments) which gives you multi-page information that you can download as a pdf. You get a portfolio x-ray, graph of portfolio performance vs a benchmark (I seem to remember you need to choose your benchmark before downloading), risk & return statistics, holding overlap, and 1yr, 3yr and 5yr performance of investments, plus a few other things.

It was done via Morningstar, but I haven't looked since the latest site re-vamp.

bluegreendeployment

LHW99 said:

You can get an "analysis report" with II.

There is a button (Analyse my Portfolio - used to be at the top right of the list of investments) which gives you multi-page information that you can download as a pdf. You get a portfolio x-ray, graph of portfolio performance vs a benchmark (I seem to remember you need to choose your benchmark before downloading), risk & return statistics, holding overlap, and 1yr, 3yr and 5yr performance of investments, plus a few other things.

It was done via Morningstar, but I haven't looked since the latest site re-vamp.

Thanks! And that allows you to see the value of your own pension pot, not just the unit prices of the funds in your pot, at a certain date?

LHW99

bluegreendeployment said:

LHW99 said:

You can get an "analysis report" with II.

There is a button (Analyse my Portfolio - used to be at the top right of the list of investments) which gives you multi-page information that you can download as a pdf. You get a portfolio x-ray, graph of portfolio performance vs a benchmark (I seem to remember you need to choose your benchmark before downloading), risk & return statistics, holding overlap, and 1yr, 3yr and 5yr performance of investments, plus a few other things.

It was done via Morningstar, but I haven't looked since the latest site re-vamp.

Thanks! And that allows you to see the value of your own pension pot, not just the unit prices of the funds in your pot, at a certain date?

The landing page, after you log in gives total value, investment value and cash value of each account (SIPP / ISA / GIA) that you hold.

You also get a downloadable quarterly report that tells you price per share / unit, no of shares / units and market value of each investment at the quarter date, as well as a record of transactions over the quarter.

Then there's an annual statement for a SIPP that gives details of contributions, plus the statutory projection of benefits, and a costs and charges statement which covers each investment in the account in more detail than I (at least) am interested in.

I did have a look today, and the button for an analysis is just called Portfolio X-Ray.

You can change the columns shown to an extent, although originally they were difficult to fix if you moved things. That got sorted some time back.

ali_bear

Thumbs up for any web based platform that actively works on improving the user experience. 

michaels

LHW99 said:

bluegreendeployment said:

LHW99 said:

You can get an "analysis report" with II.

There is a button (Analyse my Portfolio - used to be at the top right of the list of investments) which gives you multi-page information that you can download as a pdf. You get a portfolio x-ray, graph of portfolio performance vs a benchmark (I seem to remember you need to choose your benchmark before downloading), risk & return statistics, holding overlap, and 1yr, 3yr and 5yr performance of investments, plus a few other things.

It was done via Morningstar, but I haven't looked since the latest site re-vamp.

Thanks! And that allows you to see the value of your own pension pot, not just the unit prices of the funds in your pot, at a certain date?

The landing page, after you log in gives total value, investment value and cash value of each account (SIPP / ISA / GIA) that you hold.

You also get a downloadable quarterly report that tells you price per share / unit, no of shares / units and market value of each investment at the quarter date, as well as a record of transactions over the quarter.

Then there's an annual statement for a SIPP that gives details of contributions, plus the statutory projection of benefits, and a costs and charges statement which covers each investment in the account in more detail than I (at least) am interested in.

I did have a look today, and the button for an analysis is just called Portfolio X-Ray.

You can change the columns shown to an extent, although originally they were difficult to fix if you moved things. That got sorted some time back.

Thanks for this.  Didn't realise there was extra info if you set a benchmark and downloaded the PDF.  Nice to see a long view rather than just the last month of so!