Do you open a new pension when your pension fund exceeds £85,000

Marcon

sally_dickson said:

Marcon said:

flaneurs_lobster said:

Marcon said:

Plenty of threads on this topic if you have a browse. Poll is pointless - what are you going to do with the results?

Feed the results into ChatGPT - output is worth a PhD at one of the, er, newer Universities.

But that would mean getting the premise of the question correct... OP, you might want to correct (or just delete) this 'poll'. Your opening statement has the potential to mislead novices reading it. The second sentence is also unhelpful and inaccurate.

No, I guess I am just a bit thick. I don't know if my pension is protected above £85000, and I can't seem to find out where to check.

What's the point of a poll if you just want an answer for your own personal use? Asking incorrectly worded questions of a vaguely general nature is never going to give you the peace of mind you need - straw polls are only ever that!

Marcon

Cobbler_tone said:

flaneurs_lobster said:

Marcon said:

Plenty of threads on this topic if you have a browse. Poll is pointless - what are you going to do with the results?

Feed the results into ChatGPT - output is worth a PhD at one of the, er, newer Universities.

 But isn’t that the issue with AI? It will output what is input. Some of the AI responses at the head of Google are really funny but the overriding impact is pretty scary in terms of how duff info can gather momentum and be spread. It’s self fulfilling.

In answer to the original question, you can’t if you are tied to a workplace pension.

You can if the scheme allows partial transfers - and many do.

dunstonh

The vote is pointless as it doesn't cover the most common reasons.

Pensions are fully protected upto £85,000. So to be 100% protected against bank failure is the solution to have multiple pensions at different providers?

Some have 100% FSCS protection with no upper limit
Some have part of them that have no FSCS protection at all.

Comparing the banks deposit protection scheme with the investment protection scheme or the life and pensions protection scheme needs you to be aware of the differences.

Do you open a new pension when your pension fund exceeds £85,000

No, as there is no good reason to.

phlebas192

The important thing to remember with pensions is that the assets are held by trustees rather than the platform provider. That's not to say they aren't connected, they almost certainly are, but it would require either utter incompetence or outright fraud for there to be losses by the platform which impacted on the trustee ownership. These might be possible in the case of a minor specialist player (it has happened) but is very unlikely when it comes to the large, mainstream providers who only offer standard listed shares & funds. But if you have opted for a specialist investment product, eg investments in commercial property, then presumably you have factored in these sort of issues (if not, you have almost certainly signed something to the effect that you have...)

The main risk is that it might take some time for everything to be sorted out in the event of a failure. If you are accumulating prior to retirement then this really isn't a risk worth worrying about. If you are retired & reliant on the income then that's where a cash buffer outside of the pension provider comes into play.

squirrelpie

phlebas192 said:

But if you have opted for a specialist investment product, eg investments in commercial property, then presumably you have factored in these sort of issues

If you have commercial property in your pension then there's a good chance that single investment is worth over £85K I'd have thought!

Baldytyke88

I was thinking about opening another SIPP, not because I am above £85k, but just to try out another platform.

I did think it could double my fees, but HL and AJ Bell both charge a percentage, so that would be ok.

leosayer

Baldytyke88 said:

I was thinking about opening another SIPP, not because I am above £85k, but just to try out another platform.

I did think it could double my fees, but HL and AJ Bell both charge a percentage, so that would be ok.

They both charge a percentage but the fees on both are capped if you hold ETFs.

Linton

sally_dickson said:

Marcon said:

flaneurs_lobster said:

Marcon said:

Plenty of threads on this topic if you have a browse. Poll is pointless - what are you going to do with the results?

Feed the results into ChatGPT - output is worth a PhD at one of the, er, newer Universities.

But that would mean getting the premise of the question correct... OP, you might want to correct (or just delete) this 'poll'. Your opening statement has the potential to mislead novices reading it. The second sentence is also unhelpful and inaccurate.

No, I guess I am just a bit thick. I don't know if my pension is protected above £85000, and I can't seem to find out where to check.

Protected from what?

When you pay cash into a bank  the bank then owns your money and can use it for any purpose it deems appropriate. You just own a promise from the bank to pay the money back. There is a risk that the bank will go bust and so wont be able to honour the promise.

When you put your money into an S&S ISA or a SIPP or other individual pension you still own the money and the investments it has bought.  They cannot legally be used to pay the provider’s or the fund manager’s debts.  They only have there authority required to manage the money on your
behalf.

So the risks are very different.

With an individual pension one risk  could be crime or serious negligence. You avoid that by the use of mainstream regulated providers.  A further risk is that if a provider goes bust or suffers a catastrophic IT failure, it may take some time for the investments to be accessible again. You avoid that risk by using more than one provider.

A risk that has arisen in the past is that if you do hold non-mainstream investments in your portfolio and the platform goes bust  it may be expensive for the administrator to recover the money and  the costs may fall on the investors. However since each investor is protected up to £85K there should be  far more than enough in total to pay any administration costs. 

We use 3 different major SIPP/ISA providers and a wide range of mainstream funds with different managers. We have no qualms about holdings much larger than the £85K limit.

GenX0212

The thing I was wondering about recently was what would happen if a pension provider was subject to a cyber or ransomware attack such as M&S or Co-Op. Your investments themselves would remain but would the ability for the pension firm to access them?  

If an attacker encrypted the firms data then they would no longer have the ability to service your pension or even worse know what your holdings are worth. I am assuming firms will have backups and off-site storage/retrieval but no idea how long it would take them to recover ?

dunstonh

The thing I was wondering about recently was what would happen if a pension provider was subject to a cyber or ransomware attack such as M&S or Co-Op. Your investments themselves would remain but would the ability for the pension firm to access them?  

You need to look deeper than the provider.   7 of the top 10 platforms run the same backend software.    Providers just control the front end.