Your Legal Magazine
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Is your ignorance worth hundreds of thousands? by Steve Iball of deVere Spain
Last month, I spoke of the main reasons people put off talking about their pensions and future financial planning. These included the obvious one of embarrassment, and secondly, people tend to be scared of the truth. Either way, this leads to ignorance of the facts and the truth is, you can't plan on a foundation of ignorance.
You might be thinking that whatever we uncover during one of our free financial health checks, it’ll be bad news. However, a recent experience by one of my colleagues just goes to show that it’s simply not the case.
The background to this are the recent changes to the UK pension system known as ‘Pension Freedoms’. A significant number of people have uncovered a forgotten pension ‘pot’. There are literally tens of millions of pounds owed to savers who have lost track of their (or their deceased partner’s) pension fund.
During a recent deVere client meeting, we asked Arthur if he had any ‘lost’ pensions from when he worked in the UK. He said quite categorically ‘no’ based on the fact that he was a driver working mainly for himself but as he put it “occasionally on contract”, and mentioned a short spell working for Rank Hovis McDougall. It turned out his ‘short spell’ was 3 years, but even so, he said he never paid into a pension scheme. Because we take an interest in these things, we knew that RHM had non-contributory scheme and informed Arthur that even though he made no contributions, his employer did.
So, we did a little digging. We met Arthur a few weeks later and
asked if remembered our discussion about RHM. He answered “yeah, I told you it was a waste of time!” In fact this simple exercise led our client to a £102,000 surprise. We then worked out a plan whereby he took a nice lump sum plus a nice monthly payment into his bank account.
The moral of this story is unless you ask, you don’t know. deVere offers financial health checks which include a pension tracing service. It’s totally free and all it takes is making an appointment and spending an hour or so with one of accredited and fully regulated financial advisers. Just pick up the phone and call Steve Iball on 610 822 484 or email
steve.iball@devere-spain.es.
As we said last month and with respect… you’d be daft not to!
Female Focus
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