Private pension value has dropped, should I keep paying £100 monthly?

[Pensiongoingdown]

Just looked at my private pension and it's gone down again. I have had it years and can't afford to put a lot away in it, £100 a month so its not very big. It had just hit £32K before the war and now it's around the £29K mark.
I can't decide whether it's actually worth carrying on with putting money in it.

Are there any pension people around that can advise please? I am pretty money savvy but pensions have me stumped

I'm absolutely furious that our financial future is being threatened/influenced by the rantings of an orange lunatic thousands of miles away. I'm sure I'm not the only one!

Keep paying. Markets are unstable due to oil prices now but they won’t always be.

Secretbather, it's with my bank. I took it out decades ago but had to stop paying in due to lack of funds and have started again a few years ago.
I keep saying I need professional advice to see if there is anywhere else I could put it

Yes. It’ll go back up again, my pension looked terrible over Covid, rallied massively in the last couple of years, and has dropped a bit recently, but overall the trajectory has been good.

No you definitely aren’t . Every time he opens his mouth I lose money as does everyone else with investments and pensions and that’s without the price rises for everything else . It’s egotistical men , Trump Putin Xi holding the world to ransom

i don’t think you need to pay for professional advice but you will benefit from looking into it and making some decisions. Start on martins money saving website and read his stuff about pensions and investing. Or listen to some of the meaningful money podcasts on pensions.
I think about the pension just as a fancy bank account. The account itself has fees so you want to minimise those (Martin has a comparison table). Then look at the fund and decide what you want and how much do want to pay for that.

you'll feel so good once you’ve got your head around it

OP - I would suggest you check out the annual fees charged on your pension if you can find that info. Maybe on an app or an annual statement?

I've actually started pensions for the kids this week due to the drops.

Leave it be and keep adding to it.

Keep paying in you need to ride the peaks and troughs, it’ll be worth it eventually. My private pensions only small but it all adds up.

We all feel the same—it’s happened to my pension, stocks & shares ISA, and child trust funds. It’s a normal dip, which always happens when geopolitical events take place. If you stop contributing now, you will miss out on the low purchase price. Then if you wait to purchase after prices go up, you will only be buying at the expensive price, and will get fewer shares for your £100. Keep steady with drip-feeding in every month is the advice from financial experts.

It's difficult, particularly when many experts are predicting a much larger drop and the middle east is still a complete shit show with no signs of changing.

But unless you are an expert and are tracking changes very carefully (multiple times a day) it's next to impossible to outguess the market. You need to just keep the faith.

Please don’t ever stop paying into your pension. In my first job, I opted out for two years and it has been my biggest financial regret as I was so young and short-sighted.

Please learn from my mistake.

Yes!
This is the time to put money in. The gvt will add 20%, and your pension provider will buy investments cheaply atm which will go up in due course.

I lost 5k on mine this month. I need to figure out what that’s about. I’m younger but I would not stop paying in

My fund has dropped a huge amount, must be nearly 100k but I couldn’t care less for a number of reasons.

Firstly, investments are a long term project. I’ve had similar rises and falls before but the average trajectory over the last 20 years has been positive and far outweighs and cash based savings.

The second and probably most important factor to consider is the pension freedoms we now have. Previously when you had to buy an annuity on retirement, timing was everything. If war kicked off a few weeks before you retired you might end up with a 10% reduced pot value which would result in a 10% reduced annuity for life. That is why people used to de-risk investments in their latter years of work. That isn’t needed now as you don’t effectively take the entire pot in one go anymore so timing isn’t as crucial as it once was.

If markets fall and you are about to retire with a DC pot, you might only be taking 4% or so out in year 1, possibly less if you’ve taken your tax free lump sum. That means current market situation isn’t that relevant. The state of the market 10/20 years later will have more impact on your retirement funding than the position on the day you retire.

I bet if you looked around at other pension providers you could be getting better rates and lower fees than a pension that you took out 20 years ago.

It’s not even worth worrying about, just invest in a global tracker and don’t look at derisking until 5 years before retirement. The markets are only back where they were 4 months ago, the only money that’s dropped is money invested since then and only by around 3-4%.
Global trackers are still up @ 13% over the past 12 months.
Anyone still fully invested in equities or mixed asset funds if they are retiring within 3 years needs to look at partly derisking to hold 3 years income in cash or money market funds - the very worst thing to do is wait until the last minute and have to sell when markets are down.
Just remember that you haven’t ‘lost’ anything, you’ve had 25% tax relief on every £1 going in and if you’ve been investing for decades, your money should have doubled every 8 years on average.
The last decade has been particularly good for most people, even in ‘default’ funds.
One thing I don’t understand though - how can you have a private pension and not know how it’s invested? You literally have to choose your investments ( or at least an investment ‘path’ ) when you open one.

Although when you hear Ursula von de Leyen discuss this situation today she’s very certain we have not yet witnessed the devastating consequences of this war and that they are going to be felt for decades. Far worse than the pandemic blip I’m afraid.

Maybe. But…

• Ursula doesn’t have a crystal ball.
• Trump is 1 year and 2 months into his 4-year term, in which time he’s destabilised pensions/stocks twice so far—tarrifs and Iran. What should we do for the next 3 years? Stop investing? And he’s trying to get the Constitution changed so that he can run again (and if we go by Congress’ behaviour toward Trump until now, they will not stop him). Are we just supposed to stop contributing into our pensions until he’s gone?

@PhuckTrumpno but you might reconsider where to invest and for how long.

Yes, and we should all expect chaos for the next 3 years (if not more).

The global economy is out of our control so I think the best approach is to focus on what is in your control.

Make sure you're in the right fund for you - many people just stick with the default fund, but is that too cautious/adventurous for you?

If it's not a workplace pension but a personal pension, then are the platform fees and fund charges as low as they could be? If, you may be able to transfer to a better provider that does the same and takes a smaller cut.

If you are working, are you paying into your workplace pension? Employers have to match your contributions up to a certain level (if you qualify by age and earnings which most will) so this is essentially free money.

There's lots of good resources out there, so it's worth taking the time to seek out the reputable ones and get to grips with pensions. For many it's the most valuable thing we own, after our houses but we spend much less time properly considering pensions than we do on say mortgages or buying a car

Op, keep investing.

However I think you might need to review your provider. You could try Money helper as they offer advise. Do you also have a pension through work?

Yes, I have a work place pension too so I will have that too. I shall have a look at the websites mentioned so thank you to those that have told me about those

As you are over 50 you can get a free call with pensionwise. It's a government advice programme. I was in your shoes knowing nothing 4 years ago. I did the rebel finance school videos (not all of them) and this thing called meaningful money videos and it was really worth the time.