PruFund and Prudential Platform

ribtourcafe

I have been discussing my pension investments with an IFA and they have suggested moving my pension to Prudential and investing my entire pot in a single PruFund which as I understand it is a smoothed fund. I have been told the charges on this is 0.9% which seems expensive and more then I am currently paying. I am not planning to use the IFA on an ongoing basis but may use an IFA if I decide to purchase an annuity.

I haven't being able to find any positive reviews for Prudential and have the impression they normally deal with IFA's and not directly with investors. Does anyone have any experience of dealing with Prudential without using an IFA especially in relation to taking a pension if I wanted to use a combination of an annuity and drawdown? Are their customer service department helpful?

To put this into some context I am about 5 years from retirement and have approx 250K in this pension.

Albermarle

They do deal with the public directly.

In recent years their customer service was awful. It seems not be mentioned as much, so maybe it has improved.

0.9% is on the high side nowadays for a non specialised investment fund on a pension platform.

However the main drawback with the Pru, is that when you get to the stage of wanting to withdraw from the pension, they insist on you paying 3%for some kind personal advice.

When preferred pension providers are discussed on this forum, they are never mentioned.