How much of my pension pot will I lose?

Well, it could be that simple. You'd probably want to put all three schemes into one annuity. Are you sure that none of your present pensions has a guaranteed annuity rate as part of the deal? Have you considered drawdown and/or with-profits annuities? Will you be floored by the lifetime limit questionnaire. If you're happy with all this, then go ahead by yourself.

But if you go to an IFA (with the I, not without it!) then he should look at all the best rates and recommend one. This may or may not be the one with the most commission, but it should be the best for you. He will get some commission and if you had done it yourself the rate would have been exactly the same but nobody would get any commission. So why not consult an advisor?

Of course, he may charge you a fee and not take any commission and that would improve the annuity a bit. But it's only by the advisor refunding commission that you can get an improvement. Doing it yourself will not result in this.

Some companies will only deal via IFAs.

Rob Graham

Simple! You have to decide if you want the payments:

- flat rate, index linked or fixed % increase

- guaranteed for x years or no guarantee

- spouse gets nothing/50%/100% on your death

- paid monthly/six-monthly/annually

- paid at the beginning/end of the month

- paid with or without "apportionment" (?)

I couldn't find any league tables or websites that gave all the options for any provider.

Is fun to play with

If you look at Annuity Direct's website, they have a quote facility which gives the current top rates.

As mentioned, some of the insurance companies can be contacted directly, but others only deal with IFA's (such as Scottish Equitable).

Remember that Annuity Direct is an IFA, who deal mainly with post-retirement planning.

But as Rob mentioned, if you go to companies such as Norwich Union or Legal & General to purchase an annuity, any commission they would pay to an IFA will in all likelihood just be retained in their coffers.

Therefore, when dealing with annuities, you may as well use an IFA to do the donkey work. Otherwise, you'll be probably on the phone each day to various insurance companies tracking and chasing up the transfer paperwork.

Rgds Neil.

Miss L. Toe wrote:

ISTR you can get execution only deals from some financial services companies, where they refund most of the commission (in the same way as you can for unit trusts/pensions/ISAs etc).

Quite true, but any execution-only deals may depend on the value of the pension funds in question.

Things may be slightly different now, but I recall that commissions on open-market option annuities were about 1% of value of the pension funds.

If the value of the pension fund is over 6 figures, then negotiating a commission rebate will not be much of a problem.

However, if the value of the pension funds was, say, £25,000, I doubt that many financial services companies would rebate commission (unless you were a long-standing client), because they would be effectively earning a pittance anway for doing a lot of work.

I know that mentioning of the words 'Financial Advisor' + 'Commission' in this newsgroup is often like waving a red flag at a bull, and while everyone can quote instances of advisors taking obscene amount of commission for basically doing f**k all, I feel that when it comes to dealing with 'open-market option' annuity cases, most do actually deserve to earn every penny they make out of it.

The simple reason is that they are an absolute pain in the a**e to deal with. Rates move very quickly, and are usually only binding for 14 - 18 days, while you are at the mercy of insurance companies who drag their heels when you are trying to get them to transfer money to a different insurance company who is offering better annuity rates.

I suspect that if many advisors could avoid dealing with these altogether, they probably would...

Andy Pandy wrote: