Hi, my wife has 2 or 3 small pensions where she worked for companies for 2 or 3 years, and I am slowly going through them trying to decide if we should or what we should do with them.


At the moment I am dealing with her Arcadia DB pension. I got some details for the company and found I could transfer it. The figures are a pension of £191.15 per year at normal retirement date and guaranteed for life, so very small, or a scheme transfer value of £9,916. She was a member of the scheme from 1/3/1998 to 8/4/2000 and she is now 56.


I do a lot of trading as an amateur trader within ISA’s and SIPPs for myself and my family and take a small profit of my investments to live on. It doesn’t make me rich but I get by most of the time but what I am saying is I do manage to make the money grow. So we discussed this small Arcadia pension and as there is a transfer possibility so we decided it would be a good idea to move it to my wife’s SIPP and let me manage it along with the rest of her SIPP investment. We feel quite confident I can easily exceed the growth it achieves currently.


As it is under £30,000 we are not forced to take advice but both Arcadia and Hargreaves who we want to transfer it to, mention that they can do the transfer but my wife must sign a declaration declaring she is aware of everything and the benefits she is giving up by transferring a DB pension.


Its only part of their duty to mention it in this sort of correspondence but at the same time it makes me take notice and think I should check everything so at the moment I am paused at what should I do before going any further, do I need to take any advice with this small pot. Should I not transfer, which does not seem to make any sense to me, etc.



So my question on here is should we be concerned about the benefits with such a small pension?


We are not that concerned about payments if someone dies etc as we have a house and investments to pass on to our children who are mostly grown up now, we are more interested in growing the pension as much as possible.


Could someone give us some advice here, are we forgetting anything? Should we go ahead, it’s a fairly small pension which I am confident I can make a fair bit bigger by the time my wife is 65 compared to what it will grow by with Arcadia.


Any advice appreciated.