Questions About Our Service

Our charges can be found in the document ‘Services and Fees’ This contains an overview of how much we charge for each service.

If you proceed to enter the advice process, we will assess your situation and send you a ‘Personalised Charges Document’ which will contain a personalised fee. Before you incur any costs, you will need to agree to this document. You will not incur any fees until after you agree to the terms contained in the Personalised Charges Document.

These can be obtained online at www.gov.uk/check-state-pension this is a government website and instructions on how to obtain the forecast can be found on the landing page.

A forecast can be obtained via telephone using 0800 731 0175. If you have 30 days or less to your pension age, this is the only option available to you.

If you share your finances with someone else (ie a spouse or partner), we will also need a copy of their state pension forecast.

We cannot provide any advice until we have sufficient information from the schemes that we are reviewing and information relating to your circumstances. Once we have all the required information, it generally takes around 3 weeks for us to prepare and check our advice to you. As we depend upon third parties to provide us with most of the information we need, it is difficult to estimate how long the entire process will take.

If we advise that you take benefits from your existing scheme, if you are intending to retire straight away, generally you can start receiving your scheme pension within 4 weeks. If we recommend that you transfer your benefits into a new plan then this generally takes around 8 weeks. Please note however that schemes are obliged to make certain checks that the transfer is legitimate and the transfer out process can take considerably longer.

It is worth noting that transfer values are only valid for a certain period. We do not guarantee to meet this date. Our goal is to provide suitable advice to clients and we can only do this once we have all of the information that is required to provide advice. If a new transfer value is required there is often a charge for this and it could be that the new transfer value is lower than the expired one. Pensionhelp Direct will only accept clients who confirm their understanding that we do not guarantee that we will meet transfer value expiry dates.

If your Cash Equivalent Transfer Value is more than £30,000, you are obliged to take regulated financial advice.

For us to provide this advice we are obliged to collect information on your circumstances and discuss your objectives and needs. We cannot provide regulated advice without gathering this information.

Our normal policy is not to process a transaction which goes against our recommendation. In exceptional circumstances and in line with FCA rules, if you wish to proceed with a transfer against our advice, you may be able to do this.
If you elect to transfer in spite of our advice to remain in the scheme, you would be treated as an ‘insistent client’. An insistent client is an individual who has received a personal recommendation and chooses to do something other than follow the adviser’s personal recommendation.

After you have received your Full Advice Report, you will initially need to contact us to let us know that you wish to proceed in a way that differs from our advice, and the reasons why you want to do that.