Self-employed pension - NEST or other?

[Savvyshopper81]

Long story short I’ve found myself in my mid-forties without a decent pension. I have a couple of old workplace pensions but I’ve been self employed for 10 years & haven’t paid into a pension during that time. I want to set up a no nonsense, easy-to-manage self-employed pension but I’m struggling to navigate the options. For example, is NEST a good scheme versus stakeholder? Do SIPPs require some financial knowledge? I’ve tried speaking to a financial adviser but felt bamboozled with graphs, figures & jargon. Does anyone have any words of wisdom?

No, definitely not nest. You want a return on your investment of around 8% because you’re quite young you can still choose a fairly aggressive fund.
Look into what’s available I use one called 7IM but I think you have to go through a broker to choose it
you want the lowest fees possible and you want the highest return on investment possible?
If I had to choose between the two of them, I would say lowest fees because the market is volatile and there’s actually no guarantee of ROI
Nest is pretty poor though

@Profpudding Thank you. As you can probably tell I’m pretty clueless.

Nest has a good reputation if you just want something straightforward. I have a SIPP but that's because I wanted to invest ethically. You choose your own investents with a SIPP but can choose funds which are managed by someone so that makes it easier. Have you had a look at the martin Lewis website he may have some advice.

Being self employed i would put £20,000 in an Isa first then fill up the pension

Agreed don't go for nest, they take 1.8% just for putting money in!

All you need is a low cost provider, I use AJBell because they cap their fees at £10pm for SIPPs, but now there are even free options like investengine (they make money if you sit on cash vs investments, and they offer a paid version with a little assistance of 0.25%).

Given your age you really should be thinking 20years+ time horizon so you should go for 100% equities, ideally global tracker. I hold the invesco global tracker as it is market weighted and only 0.15% fee. So if I held that wihtin investengine that is all i would pay.

For you, if you're not sure then the 0.25% fee option from investengine might be a good one for you, you may need to pay the ETF fund ongoing fees on top but all-in it will still be pretty cheap, and cheaper than NEST.

Look up Rebel Finance School on YouTube, all your questions re how to plan for retirement will be answered in their 10 week course which is 2 weeks in. Basically get a sipp with low fees, eg ii, then invest within the sipp in passive index funds with no FA taking a management fee. You should be able to transfer in your other old pensions which are probably underperforming due to high fees and being too conservative.