How much do you put in your pension?

[needmorstuff]

Hargreaves lansdown sipp

is that due to low fees or access to a wider investment landscape?

[dingdong]

Hargreaves is good place to start.

Once you have over £40k (can't remember the exact figure but its easy enough to calculate) you're better off moving to a fixed fee provider like interactive investor that doesn't charge any platform percentage fees (they have a fixed fee of around £120 a year instead).

And the easiest option is to go with a Vanguard Lifestrategy fund where you get a low cost, diversified fund with ongoing automatic asset rebalancing so you can just forget about it and get on with your life rather than constantly tinkering with your investments.

[SimonMac]

Hargreaves is good place to start.

Once you have over £40k (can't remember the exact figure but its easy enough to calculate) you're better off moving to a fixed fee provider like interactive investor that doesn't charge any platform percentage fees (they have a fixed fee of around £120 a year instead).

And the easiest option is to go with a Vanguard Lifestrategy fund where you get a low cost, diversified fund with ongoing automatic asset rebalancing so you can just forget about it and get on with your life rather than constantly tinkering with your investments.

HL have a fixed fee of £200 a year for shares, if you don't use funds HL is very good value

[Old Greg]

is that due to low fees or access to a wider investment landscape?

It can be classed as pension so doesn't affect his benefits.

[DonkeyRhubarb]

...constantly tinkering with your investments.

Been there, done that, got the (poor performance) t-shirt.

[psychocandy]

is that due to low fees or access to a wider investment landscape?

Low fees and easy to use.

[psychocandy]

Been there, done that, got the (poor performance) t-shirt.

Its tempting but I try to leave them alone a bit.

H-L do their top 100 or whatever so I try to stick with them.

[lionheart79]

I wish the newbies would get that.

I know you're constantly banging this drum Northernlad but when you are 'only' paying your accountant the equivalent of 60-90 minutes of your own chargeable time each month, it is easy to feel like you're taking the p*ss if you keep hitting them with demands. IT Security isn't that much higher up the professional food chain than accountancy... if at all!

Of course for the really important issues or when wanting to be sure one stays on the right side of tax regulation and law it is right to defer to your accountant, but otherwise there is no harm in asking [non-binding] warm-up questions from community folks first?!

[lionheart79]

If you mean "saved" in a bank, that's really not true, you are only guaranteed up to 75 K, within one banking group.

Actually this does raise another question I had - for those of you that have saved up reasonable war chests >75K, do you open accounts with other banks just to get around the compensation limit? Surely it must be more of a worry the bigger the balance gets over and above that FSCS limit, though of course if we get to the point that a major bank fails who knows what sort of economic predicament the wider world will be in...

[Hobosapien]

FSCS limit isn't the only thing to consider/worry about. There's also the potential bail-in next time the banks need rescuing, as seen in Cyprus a few years ago. Easier for them to do now those with positive bank balances are treated as bank creditors rather than customers, so would join the normal creditor priority queue when a company goes bust.

Depends how big the next bank crash is and how political it gets as far as what the government are willing to do to rescue them, but for other reasons too it makes less sense to have one massive pot of cash earning below real inflation interest year on year.

So pension contributions and other ways of spreading the risk for medium/long term investment are worth serious investigation.