Should I transfer out my old Aviva pension into USS pension?

[Redpolkadotpot]

Hello all,
Not very pension savvy, tried to research but get very confused as lots of lingo that goes over my head a bit!

I have an old Aviva pension from previous workplace, around £11k now so not large and I noticed their annual fees are quite a lot to the point where I'm thinking by the time I retire in 25 years it'll be £0 if it doesn't go up.

So I'm wondering if I should transfer it out and combined with my current USS pension instead? Or elsewhere altogether, have a Nutmeg too but only £900!

Tried to find out if there are exit fees but could not find anything clearcut. I am assuming if in my USS the fees would be less?!

TIA !

The USS pension is very good if you have the final salary scheme. I didn’t transfer 5 year’s contributions from Standard Life and it was a big mistake in the end.

Unfortunately I don't have the final salary scheme as they ended that before I joined :(

Get out of the Aviva pension if you value your sanity- the company is a total joke. Customer service is appalling. They made a mistake on my pension and I have spent the last 18 months ( 14 phone calls , endless letters and emails and a complaint to the ombudsman man) and they still haven't sorted it.

I tried to do this exact thing but gave up as it was so ridiculously complicated.

Gosh, starting to feel like pensions are a bit of a scam. Unless you stay in the same job forever which is uncommon these days, it feels like you're paying out hundreds per month to get very little back by the time you retire!
Some of my colleagues are talking about opting out altogether for this reason (although I'm unwilling to go that far right now anyway).

Please don't opt out of an employer scheme as you will be missing out on money. If they're contributing 5% and you earn 30k, that's more than £100 a month you're not getting. Madness.

Generally the advice is the make sure you're funding the pension high enough to take advantage of employer matching (so if the standard employer contribution is 5% but they will match up to a further 4%, try and pay the 4% yourself so they then pay the full 9%.).

Pensions are just long term savings plans with tax advantages. I recommend listening to the Meaningful Money podcasts by Pete Matthew as he explains things really well. There's also a Facebook site you can join and ask questions.

There might be some guarantees on the Aviva plan that you'd lose if you transferred out - a financial adviser could help you with that. You can find one at unbiased.com. I know I didn't transfer one of my previous schemes for that reason.

I had a Scottish widows pension from old jobs and transferred it all into USS. No idea about the fees but just wanted it all in one place

How long have you been in USS? Some schemes have a rule that a transfer in must be done within a certain time of joining the scheme. No idea if that applies to USS but worth checking if you’ve been in it more than a year as you might not be allowed to do it anyway.

ah yes I personally won't opt out for this reason, feels like free money to me. I logged into USS to find out info about transferring and saw that my employer contributes over £700pm and then I only need to contribute £250pm or so, seems like too good of a deal to opt out of...but I can see why people are distrusting of whether we'll see much of any of it...

@ChessieFL Around 5 years so long enough, I will check to see if it's even possible then. I think I'd prefer transferring to USS rather than something like Nutmeg.

I did just this recently moved old small aviva pension to USS and glad I did. Aviva fees really high was facing getting less than paid in and reducing annually. USS still performing pretty well.

I heard rumours a while ago that USS was underfunded, hence Trinity College Cambridge paying to extract itself, as it has money, and didn't want to be called on to subsidise the scheme if other universities went bankrupt.

I don't think USS charge to transfer a pension in. The thing you need to check is where your money will go - to the Retirement Income Builder (the bit you and your employer contribute to and which will give you an income based on your income and the number of years you've paid in) or the Investment Builder which is more like a private pension for people who put in additional voluntary contributions or who earn over a certain amount. The fund it will go in depends on what sort of pension the Aviva pension was (defined benefit or defined contribution). I think it's simpler to transfer in but that's a comment made on the basis of convenience, without any idea of what's right for you.

MmePoppySeedDefage USS claim it's in surplus now. It's not what it was as a pension scheme but the employer contributions help.