I have (plus employers contributions) been paying into various pension funds for the past 25 years or so. This is what I have about now:
Aviva* 131.3k "my private pension, which was consolidated with an employers dormant scheme some years back"
Fidelity* 3.1k "my current employer's present provider"
Standard Life 41.1k "my current employer's earlier provider"
Scottish Widows 1.1k "my previous employer's final provider"
Halifax Financial Services 5.7k "my previous employer's initial provider"
I have put an asterisk next to the ones which are being contributed to currently. I wouldn't mind consolidating a few of them together, as you can probably imagine. What I have in mind is either merging the Scottish Widows and the Halifax Pensions into the Aviva or the Standard Life pensions. That will leave 3 separate schemes, 2 (the SL and AV) of which are now only to be contributed by me and are reasonably mature and the FID one which is a scheme recently started for joint contributions.
Now enter my "pension adviser". I do not directly pay him, however when I started my first private pension 25 years ago, it was he who introduced me to Norwich Union (which then became Santader, and is now Aviva), and I believe he is paid by my contributions (somehow?) via. the fees/costs charging structure.
I believe that my adviser, in addition to working with Aviva, is now also with Standard Life, since he is now trying to persuade me to consolidate everything, except my current employer/employee Fidelity scheme all into Standard Life. I did at first state that I was happy to merely consolidate the smaller ones (SW and HFS) into one of bigger schemes....(like I said earlier I'm content to keep tabs on 3 schemes), but he has come back with another suggestion of him merging my SL+AV+SW+HFS, all into SL.
I'm naturally a slightly cynical person, so I'm suspicious that he is perhaps getting a commission from SL based on all these previous schemes coming together, and perhaps ignoring my opinions very slightly.
What advice can people give me? Am I just being plain stubborn in not wishing him go ahead with his proposal? What pros and cons are there with either my 3 scheme (SL, AV, and FID) approach and his 2 scheme (SL and FID) idea? Is there much difference?
Furthermore, I imagine (I wouldn't know for sure, I've been largely ignorant of my pensions for the first part of my working life), that things are now much more transparent and accessible than they were in the mid-90s.....I assume that I don't really need to include my pension adviser anymore in the loop really (or should I?), as I assume that I should be able to execute a lot of the consolidating decisions myself, either over the phone or online.
many thanks, all advice appreciated,
Matt - husband of Mel