To combine or keep separate

[Rumpumpum]

I have 6 pensions soon to be 7. I combined one pension that I had already with another. There are no fees for transferring but my fees are between 0-1%. On rebel finance school they said you should be aiming on fees of less than 0.4%. On some of the company pensions I have, even though it costs 0% I can’t pay anymore into them. Anyone know of good pensions that charge less than 0.4%? What other things do I need to think of? I would like there to be slightly less pensions to reduce the complexity but not sure what the advantages could be?

Have a look at a SIPP with a platform like AJ Bell. There are 3 types of charges

1. the platform fee which starts at 0.25% but reduces for higher value accounts

2. a dealing charge for buying and selling investments. If you stick to funds rather than individual shares it’s £1.50 per transaction.

3. If you invest in funds then each fund has its own charge which will be taken account of in the price of the fund. Passive funds can be as low as 0.1%, more active funds as high as 1%

If you are not confident enough to choose your own investments they have a range of managed funds which have a fee of around 0.31%.

I also like Interactive Investor as it has a fixed platform fee of either 5.99 or 12.99 a month depending on the size of your total pot but there are others such as Hargreaves Lansdown, Fidelity and Vanguard.

I prefer having as few pensions as possible to keep track of and if I were you would combine as many as I could. I recently pulled 4 together in interactive investor. However some people worry about having all their investments in one place in case something goes wrong with the platform. My understanding is that if a platform stops trading you still own the investments but there may be a delay in getting full access to them.

if any of your pensions are defined benefit rather than defined contribution it will be virtually impossible and very expensive to move them and I wouldn’t bother trying.