Timescale to move from SIPP to drawdown AC with Hargreaves Lansdown?

Goldiegirl

Following my post of the 9th March, I messaged HL to enquire what was happening. They messaged back to say they would do the drawdown ‘as soon as practicable’, which wasn’t really a lot of help!

We are not desperate for the money, in fact we are only doing the drawdown as my husband is 75 later this year. We intend placing the money in our ISAs, using this years allowance and the remainder in next years allowance. By applying in mid February we thought there would be ample time, but beginning to think this won’t happen now.

We are going away for few days, but when we return we’ll have to phone for some more robust chasing. I thought this was going to be a relatively easy process, but am starting to find the delay rather stressful.

KrullTheSaver

Yeah, the 15 day thing isn't real. It's just part of their form responses and they'll keep quoting that 20, 30, … days later. If you're keeping it simple and just moving the whole thing into drawdown you may get lucky. If it's partial drawdown with selected funds and a balancing fund there's a good chance they'll bounce it around for it a bit asking for multiple confirmations. Anything other than the basic day-to-day buy/sell/add/withdraw seems to be problematical for them. Don't expect transfers out to be smooth either. They may be. But it seems HL can find opportunities to fat-finger things there too.

Goldiegirl

Just an update for completeness.

We went away on our short break and on our return I phoned HL on Thursday 19th March to enquire what happening with the draw down. I was told that it would be worked on the next day (Friday 20th ) and the lump sum would be paid on Monday 23rd. As it turned out, the admin was done on the Monday, and the funds were finally received on Tuesday 24th, exactly 5 weeks since the application was submitted.

I'm pleased it's done, and we still have time to utilise our ISA allowances for this tax year, so everything has turned out ok.

But, I wasn't expecting such a long delay, and can't help thinking that if I hadn't phoned, we'd still be waiting. We haven't any plans to make any more withdrawals in the foreseeable future, but after I've had a rest from thinking about pensions, I intend seeing what other providers can offer, and maybe consider a transfer.

Nebulous2

To update this - HL seem to have resolved their issue of long delays in processing drawdown requests. I said earlier in the thread that a friend had a long delay in getting a modest amount transferred to drawdown and the tax free amount paid out.

They submitted a further request on Friday the 3rd, over the holiday weekend, and the money was paid out yesterday, the 9th of April. We thought that was good considering the holidays and it was a dramatic improvement on the last time.

Albermarle

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81957446#Comment_81957446

I guess the issue is that HL will have a fixed resource/number of people allocated to this procedure. If requests go up 20% , then delays start and accumulate. Eventually they allocate more resources/people and situation is resolved..