SIPP management ongoing - where to even start?

Hi, maybe worth watching the 'Investing Demystified Video Series' by Lars Kroijer for research

As SonOf says, your saying it is a SIPP is very surprising as your fund is a pension fund rather than a unit trust/OEIC and the 5 year lifestyling which appears to be a feature of one of L&Gs Group Personal Pensions employer schemes.

If you want to start managing your own retirement and perhaps other financial affairs I suggest the following strategy:
1) Understand what you have now
Assuming you knw nothing at the moment: The fund you give appears to be L&G Global Equity Fixed Weights 50:50 Index Pension Fund with Life Styling from 5 years before your stated retirement date.

The Global Equity bit means it is 100% invested in world wide shares. Given you are say 30 years from retirement this is a sensible choice. During the next 30 years the fund value will possibly have falls of up to 50% during a major crash but the overall trend will be up. During the falls your contributions will buy more shares so you will need the mindset to regard them as an opportunity rather han a disaster. Equity is the most certain way of ensuring that the returns on your investments exceed inflation.

Fixed Weights means that the fund manager has decided to allocate fixed %s of your money to the various parts of the world. This is a reasonable approach

50:50 means that one of the fixed %s is the 50% allocated to UK companies with 50% allocated elsewhere. This was common say 20 years ago but now many investors would consider this is too much UK. The problem is that there are very few large UK companies in the major growth technology sectors. So the UK has generally underperformed the rest of the world over the past 10 years.

Index means that within each geographic area companies are held in proportion to their size using the appropriate Index such as the FTSE100. This is a common approach as it is simple and cheap to implement. There may be arguments whether this is optimal but for your purposes it is very sensible.

5 year lifestyling means that once you are within 5 years of retirement the pension money is gradually moved into very safe but low return investments. This is highly desirable if you intend to spend all your money on an annuity but much less so if you plan to drawdown over many years directly from the pension pot. However it doesnt matter at the moment since you are many years from retirement.


2) Where do you want to be?
For retirement, this is when do you want to retire and how much income will you need. From this you can estimate how much money you will need in your pension pot.


3) How to get there
What sort of investments should you be using and how much should you be contributing to achieve your required pension pot?


4) Implementation
ISAs or Pensions, SIPPs/Personal Pensions/Employer Pensions. Which funds. etc etc.

If you can acquire the knowledge and understanding to go through the steps from (1) to (4) yourself then you may not need an IFA. You will learn a lot in the process. If you use an IFA you will go through the process quicker, be less likely to make mistakes, but incur fees and perhaps learn less.