How to consolidate multiple pensions

Have you got more than one pension? If you’ve had more than one job, there’s a good chance you’ve got more than one pension to your name. It’s as simple as that.

But why would I have more than one pension?

The Office of National Statistics report that contributions to pensions schemes rose rapidly in to over £14billion. That's lots of money going into pension pots and people who have had lots of job roles at different companies could have quite a few different pension pots.

Things to consider when you have more than one pension

Having more than one pension pot can be confusing so you might want to speak to a financial adviser to help you make sense of them all.

One of your options when it comes to having more than one pension is to combine them. Or, as it’s called in pension-speak – consolidation. Having all your funds in one pot can make things easier to manage and could possibly reduce the fees you are paying to the plan managers.

Some pension plans contain guaranteed benefits and others may charge an exit fee if the plan is moved before retirement.  If you can't find out all of these bits of information yourself you can ask a professional financial adviser to make a recommendation to you.

Of course, you can leave them all where they are and forget about them until you retire but it could be easy to forget about something that you haven’t seen for maybe 30 or 40 years. What you do with multiple pensions depends on how you prefer to manage your finances, it’s a really personal decision.

It’s very important to review your pension situation regularly and to keep documents related to your schemes safely together. When speaking to a financial adviser, you'll need to get hold of up-to-date documents from each pension provider so bear this in mind when deciding to keep multiple pensions open, too.

Remember, the value of an investment and income from it can go down as well as up and is not guaranteed.