Your advice options

What advice can you offer me?

Should you choose to receive advice, we can offer you either a limited or comprehensive advice service on the transfer of benefits. Please ask us for information about the fees for this if you are interested in proceeding.

Please note, we generally do not engage with clients for DB transfer advice who are not intending to access income benefits in the immediate future, typically within the next 12 months. The fees for advice may mean smaller transfer values are less likely to warrant the costs of taking advice. You should check with your scheme administrator for any restrictions on transfers of benefits, and if you are not UK resident, we may not be able to provide any advice at all.

Before seeking advice, you should consider what you want your retirement to look like.

It can then be helpful to think about the costs and your spending priorities like this:

• Essential spending – heating, eating, transportation, insurance and unfortunately tax
• Lifestyle spending – the things that bring you joy, fun and pleasure beyond just getting by, and
• Discretionary spending – this can be fulfilling dreams or anything else with what’s left over after the essential and lifestyle spending are taken care of.

Once you know what you need in these areas, financial advice can help you figure out what is possible and how best to achieve it.

Abridged advice

Abridged advice is a reduced level of service compared to full advice and only considers your circumstances and your pension value. It is a cheaper option than full advice and can be used to give you two possible outcomes. It requires your adviser to ask questions to obtain comprehensive information about you, your needs and circumstances. It does not include more detailed analysis of your pension scheme or future circumstances in retirement.

The outcome from your adviser will only be either a:

1. Recommendation that you should not transfer your pension; or a
2. Statement that a recommendation either way couldn’t be made based on the information provided and in order to make a conclusive recommendation you would need to pay for full advice that would include a detailed analysis of your scheme benefits.

While abridged advice is a shorter process, it still requires an adviser to gather a lot of information about you and your retirement requirements.

Your adviser will set out all the fees for abridged advice for you to consider and if agreed, your adviser can commence with the abridged advice service. The fee for carrying out this process is lower than for full advice. If, after following this process, you wish to proceed to full advice we will discount the abridged fee from the full advice fee. So, you don’t pay twice for the common elements.

If it’s not clear that you should retain your existing scheme benefits, your adviser will discuss how much it would cost to provide you with full advice should you decide to proceed further. Your adviser will only proceed to the full advice stage with your agreement.

Abridged advice is optional, and you can choose to go straight to full advice if you prefer.

Full advice

Our Full advice service considers all relevant options including – if a transfer is in your best interests - where to invest your money. If you choose to receive full advice your adviser will discuss our fees and any associated costs with you and will only proceed with your express agreement to do so.

Advice will involve collecting extensive and detailed information about you. Your adviser will then conduct a detailed analysis of your pension scheme and consider the impact this will have on you and your retirement. This will include comparing the benefits of retaining your pension scheme to meet your current and future objectives and a conclusive final recommendation stating whether it is in your best interests to retain or transfer the pension at this point in time.

If we make a recommendation and you wish to proceed against our advice, we will not be able to arrange this for you.

Your adviser will charge you a fee for the advice which you will be told at the outset, and it will become payable in accordance with the terms agreed with you. Your adviser will discuss with you how the fees for advice can be paid.

Please be aware that regardless of the advice given, any pre-agreed fees will still be payable. This includes a recommendation to retain your pension benefits.