Workplace and personal pensions found, costed, and consolidated only where it helps.
What you have, what it costs, what it will do
Most working lives now produce a drawer of pensions rather than one. They carry different charges, different funds, different death benefits and different guarantees, and those differences only become expensive at the moment the money is needed. The work is unglamorous: find them all, cost them side by side, understand what is guaranteed, and move nothing unless moving it genuinely improves something.
Typical matters
Who we act for
People with several pots from several employers, anyone within a decade of retirement who has never had the arrangements costed, and people who have been offered a transfer and want it looked at by someone with no stake in the answer.
Speak to an adviserIn more detail
The first job is an inventory, and it is almost always longer than the client expects. Automatic enrolment means short jobs leave pensions behind, and a thirty-year career can easily produce six or seven arrangements with providers that have since merged, rebranded or been bought.
The Pension Tracing Service finds schemes where contact has been lost. Old payslips and P60s fill the gaps. Then each provider is written to directly with four questions: current value, total annual cost, the death benefits, and what guarantees would be lost on transfer. Until that list exists, any decision to consolidate is a guess dressed up as tidying.
Some older contracts carry benefits that modern ones do not and cannot. A guaranteed annuity rate promises to convert the fund into income at a rate set decades ago, which can be very substantially better than anything available today. Others carry guaranteed minimum pensions, or terminal bonuses that only pay if the policy runs to its original date.
None of this appears on an annual statement. It lives in the policy conditions, which is why it has to be asked for in writing. Transferring away from a guarantee is occasionally still right — but it should be a decision taken knowingly, with the value of what is being given up on the table.
Most people in a workplace scheme are in its default fund, because that is what happens when no choice is made. Default funds are designed to be defensible for a very broad population, which means they are rarely wrong and rarely right.
The mismatch matters most near retirement, where some defaults still move automatically towards assets suited to buying an annuity — sensible for someone who intends to buy one, and actively unhelpful for someone planning to stay invested and draw down. It is worth knowing which your scheme does, and when it starts doing it.
Pension contributions attract tax relief, within limits, and those limits interact with income in ways that catch people out — particularly higher earners, anyone with variable income, and anyone who has already begun drawing flexibly from a pension, which restricts what can be contributed afterwards.
We do not quote the current figures here because they change and a website that states them is wrong within the year. What matters is that the limits exist, that exceeding them creates a tax charge rather than a warning, and that the position should be checked before a large contribution rather than after.
Before we speak
The inventory is the whole job at this stage. Bring whatever you can find, including paperwork for schemes you think are too small to matter — those are frequently the ones carrying old guarantees.
If you have none of it
People often delay a first conversation until they have assembled a file. That delay costs more than the missing paperwork does. Tell us what you know, and we will work out what needs finding — and in what order.
Speak to an adviserPlain English
The words that turn up in this area, written for people who are not lawyers — because that is who has to make the decisions.
Common questions
Only where it genuinely improves something — lower total cost, better investment options, or simply making the money manageable. It should never be done before the guarantees and charges on each arrangement have been established.
Usually. The Pension Tracing Service is free and finds most schemes. Old employment records, payslips and P60s cover most of the rest.
It depends on the type of arrangement and on the nomination held by the provider. Pensions generally pass outside the will, which is why an out-of-date nomination is one of the most common and most expensive oversights we find.
⟦Defined benefit transfer advice requires a specific FCA permission. Confirm whether the firm holds it. If it does not, this must say the work is referred to a firm that does.⟧
There is no universal figure, and anyone offering one has not asked enough questions. It depends on the income you want, when you want it, what is already accumulated and what else you have. Modelling answers it specifically.
Pensions are held with regulated providers and benefit from protections that vary by arrangement type. The value still moves with the investments inside them, which is a different question from safety and more often the one people actually mean.
Important
The value of a pension and the income it produces can fall as well as rise. What you get back is not guaranteed and depends on investment performance, charges and how long the money has to last.
Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may change in future. Statements here describe the rules as they generally apply, not advice on your position.
How it works
A call at our cost to understand what you are trying to do and tell you plainly whether we can help. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need advice at all, or not yet — and we would rather say that than bill you for finding out slowly.
Before any work starts you get the scope, the approach, who will do the work and what it will cost, in writing. Independence means we are paid by you rather than by a provider, and you should be able to see exactly what you are paying and for what.
A written recommendation you can read, question and keep, setting out what we suggest and why — including the options we rejected. Then a review at agreed points, testing the plan against what actually happened rather than restating it.
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