Posts tagged with "finance"

A lot of people write in and ask Norman - whatever happened to that SIPP you started 10 years ago ? Has it produced enough to retire on ? Was it a lot of work ? Did it outperform the FTSE100 ?

I took the 'long term buy and hold forever and 'strategic ignorance' ethos to its logical extreme and forgot about the SIPP completely. Once all the pension funds were transferred and a collection of high yielding UK shares purchased, I forgot about it. I didn't sell any shares. I didn't feverishly check the balance daily. I didn't panic during the banking crisis of 2008. I didn't respond to any corporate actions. Occasionally, I bought a new share once enough funds had accumulated from dividend payments.

The long term performance of my SIPP versus the FTSE also interested me so recently, I endured the time consuming, arduous and rather tedious exercise of reconstructing the detailed transaction and dividend history, spanning 11 years, of my pension portfolio which produced an interesting graph (courtesy of ft.com).

Not enough to retire on but getting there.

Update: A better comparison is with the FTSE100 (accumulation units) where dividend income is automatically re-invested.

And just this once, not mine.

When you take out a Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP), most SIPP schemes are unable to accept Protected Rights.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Sippdeal contact me asking for authorisation to make a payment from my SIPP to Equitable Life in respect of a refund of Protected Rights payments that the Government are requesting, in turn, from Equitable Life.

Equitable Life claim this refund is now very urgent because the original request was made in January 2006 and no response has been received.

I ask Sippdeal why they didn't forward this original letter from Equitable Life to me in January. The answer was simple. Sippdeal did not receive any such letter from Equitable Life in January 2006. Sippdeal are efficient. Sippdeal communicate via email. Sippdeal send me copies of correspondence from Equitable scanned into a PDF. Sippdeal answer my emails promptly. Sippdeal are well informed and helpful.

So I contact Equitable Life directly and ask them why a refund of protected rights contributions is required from a SIPP that was legally unable to receive any protected right contributions.

Inevitably, after a lengthy delay and some 'research', it transpires the letter (both of them in fact) were sent to Sippdeal 'by mistake' and should have been sent to my other pension provider.

I'm not sure whether my decision to consolidate all my pension plans into a SIPP was the correct one and whether my SIPP funds will outperform the fund managers in grey suits.

However, for the pleasure of not having to deal with Equitable Life any longer (apart from the rare interruption caused by their unbelievable incompetence), I'm prepared to take my chances.