Pension Advice
Pension advice is important for anyone who wants specialist, qualified financial advice regarding anything to do with pensions or pension funds. Whether taking out a new pension, transferring a pension scheme or even obtaining access to pension benefits before your normal retirement age, a pension advisor can help. Pension advice is essential to helping you understand what routes may be open to you and how they may affect your situation.
You can, should you desire, decide not to take pension advice and instead choose which pension route you wish to take yourself. However, to be a qualified individual or firm that may provide pension advice an advisor must be regulated and qualified under the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the financial industry’s regulator. This ensures that the advice they provide is of a minimum standard by providing strict guidelines in how they may help you in addition to ensuring the advisor’s knowledge is sufficiently high to provide pension advice.
Pension advice experts will know all about the pension market, they will know about the type of plan you have (or wish to take out) and they will know what else is available to you. The merits of a pension advisor are clear; they are industry trained professionals who are required by the FSA to put your needs first.
To receive full pension advice however, you will be required to provide the advisor with detailed information about yourself, your circumstances and your objectives through what is known as a FSA required ‘know your client’ review. This review will allow the pension advice provided by the advisor to be suitable to your specific needs and it will be tailored around you, it will not be general, generic advice.
You will be informed of the need to complete this review once you have initially spoken to the advisor to receive pension advice, they may also tell you what information you need to have for the review to make the process smoother for you.
Such information may be your current financial information and what pension needs you may have. If you desire the pension advice to be focused around your already existing pension schemes then you will be required to fill in a letter of authority before you proceed with the advisor, this will allow them to contact the relevant pension schemes regarding your plans. This letter of authority will allow the pension advisor to act on your behalf and to complete actions for you, reducing the work you need to do.