Flexible drawdown

Notfarfromtheborder

muswellblue said:

Hi,

So I have a legal and general worksave pension, do they allow UFPLS withdrawals? 

I think they allow it, but you can only take one tax free sum. I was told that if I took my tax free cash, any subsequent withdrawals would be taxable, even if through future contributions there should have been more tax free cash available

gm0

I don't find L&G worksave that modern in channel support for occasional rebalancing.  Doing monthly UFPLS with them using their "one off UFPLS mechanism" could well get tedious indeed. Due to firing requests into the ether with limited visibility/transparency. And it's not really setup for that.  Somebody who does it may happen along to say it's fine.  I don't use them that way.  Only work with them when resetting income/rebalancing.  Otherwise income ticks away with no asset sales.

Pros:

- Perfectly good passive funds at market price.  Insured. 100% FSCS protection.
- Just works - backed by large long established life company
- Passive equities and multi-asset fund selection plausible

- Platform fee can be good value depending on employer.  Or not.  A contract you don't control as it is typically the scheme trustees.

- Don't especially like the bond fund selection

- Tendency to offer "complicated"  composite funds with combinations of indices and targets.  Which I don't like. The selection of the simpler funds offered is thus smaller.  Many worksaves have more funds than occupationals of old - say 30 vs 10.  But we are not talking about fund supermarket/retail SIPP.

Cons

- Archaic channel support - web, app etc vs retailers.  We are in "pension admin" land not modern digital consumer direct.

My conclusion going into it and since after a few years living with it.  Is that it was fine (not better, not worse) as a place to hold part of my drawdown portfolio.  Because I was already a customer (via old occupational).  I would not have gone looking for them if not already entangled via old employer.  And to be fair. That is the use case. Employer schemes (old - for drawdown master trust alongside a no-freedoms veteran) and for new - for accumulation - via the L&G pension admin service.  All providing a stream of funds for LGIM as fund house.

Unexciting.  In a good way.  And a bad one.