Don't understand why my workplace pension is worth so little, is my advisor scalping me?

[SarahandMattGregory]

I have worked at my current place of employment for almost exactly ten years. Between my employer and I £187.50 gets paid into my workplace pension each month with Prudential. So over the ten years that's £22,125 before any growth.

I don't check it and I wasn't receiving any annual statements, so I was really quite surprised to find out that my workplace pension is worth... £17,900. How?

Well, I checked the T's & C's (perhaps I should have before) and the pension advisor, who I have literally spoken to twice in ten years, takes a 0.75% annual management fee of the value of the pension, and a 3% transaction fee on all direct debits (so that's presumably straight off the monthly contributions).

But even all that only totals about £1,750 (pension advisor must be doing well when you multiply all that up by the number of 'clients' they must have).

So, where have all my pension contributions gone? I know the economy hasn't exactly been doing amazing, but I can see from my statement that the money has gone into the PruFund Growth Fund (Series A), and it looks as though this has grown by an average 6.8% annually in the last decade (https://www.fundslibrary.co.uk/FundsLibrary.BrandedTools/Pru/DataOnline/HtmlFactsheet/c26d93f2-afd5-4cdf-a6d7-28657a796146#essentials), so how on earth is my pension worth 20% less than the contributions I've made?

That's a puzzler. You can't look at the figures that easily, though. For most of those ten years, you had a much lower balance to benefit from that growth, and the fund lost money in the last year.

The expenses and fees are eye-watering as well.

Can your company have someone from Prudential review it with you?

Did you always earn the same salary as you get paid now? If you earnt less then your contributions would have been less. Also what risk profile is your fund invested in?

Please ask for a transaction report from your pension provider and you'll see how this has happened. You may want to build a spreadsheet to fully understand it ; it may just be timings.

Your pension advisor alone will not be receiving the 0.75% amc - that will be for the fund manager and other overheads as well.

If it's held in an index fund that's the management charge not just the adviser charge, hopefully anyway. The transaction fee is quite punchy but that's usually levied on the actual investment transfer as opposed to your bank transfer. It's the charge to trade the units, basically.
If the average return is skewed towards lower returns in recent years and higher returns in earlier years, that means you were earning good returns on a small amount of capital, and losing money on the largest amount of capital over the period, which would explain the numbers.

If it's held in an index fund that's the management charge not just the adviser charge, hopefully anyway. The transaction fee is quite punchy but that's usually levied on the actual investment transfer as opposed to your bank transfer. It's the charge to trade the units, basically.

It's not an index fund. If you click on the link OP provided to the fund profile you'll see it's actively managed and has total fund expenses of 1.72% in addition to the pension 0.75% management fee. I wonder if the 3% transaction fee is being levied on every monthly contribution. That would make it like a sales commission or load, almost unheard of these days.

As the old saying goes, where are the customer's yachts?

Why do you have a "pension advisor" in connection with a workplace pension scheme????

What's the advisor for?!