How combining your pensions works
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Register
Once you’ve decided that you want to use the service you can register by providing some basic personal information. We’ll then ask you to review and sign a digital letter of authority. This allows us to get information about your pensions from your old employers and pension providers.
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Tell us about your old pension plans
Tell us what you can about your old plans, such as the name of your pension provider or who you were employed by. We’ll get to work finding your old pensions and keep you updated by email. You can also view progress on your dashboard.
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Review
Once we’ve located an old plan, we’ll notify you by email and add all the information to your dashboard so that you can review it.
We’ll tell you whether your old plan has any:
- Guarantees, protection or other benefits that you will lose if you transfer.
- Features that may mean we are unable to transfer it. See ‘Pensions you may not be able to transfer’ in the ‘Important Information’ section below.
- Transfer penalties. -
Transfer
Once you’ve reviewed the information you’ll need to confirm if you’re happy to proceed with the transfer of your old plan. We’ll then keep you updated during the transfer and you can check progress on your dashboard.
It usually takes about 4-16 weeks to locate and transfer eligible plans but this will depend on how quickly your old pension providers respond and if they need any more information.
- You should check if the fees and charges of your current Legal & General plan are higher or lower than your old plan. The charges that are deducted affect how your pension fund grows. Make sure that charges in your Legal & General plan justify transferring from your old plan.
- Check if your old plan has any guarantees, protection or other benefits that you will lose if you transfer. For example protected tax-free cash, a protected retirement age or certain death benefits. We’ll let you know if any apply.
- Check if there are any transfer penalties for leaving your old plan. We'll show you if one applies and if it’s more than £10 we'll also notify you.
- Your current Legal & General plan may have features, conditions and retirement options that are different to your old plan, for example, investment choice. You should check that you’re comfortable with these.
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Your old plan has benefits that are classed as safeguarded benefits;
– You are in a defined benefit pension scheme (also known as ‘final salary’);
– Your scheme has a guaranteed annuity rate (GAR);
– Your scheme has a guaranteed minimum pension (GMP); - You are invested in a with profits fund.
While your transfer is being completed
While your transfer is being completed there could be a short period of time when your money is not invested. This is the time between when your old pension provider sells your investment units held with them and pays your transfer to Legal & General.
If the market rises during this period, an element of investment growth may be missed out on. However, the opposite can also happen and markets could fall between the encashment of the units held with your old provider and when the cash is received at Legal & General. In this scenario your cash transfer value will purchase more units in the new investment fund or funds your new plan invests in.
For this to have a considerable impact, the market would probably need to move significantly, although it’s still a risk that you need to be aware of.
How much the service costs
We won’t charge you any fees for using the service. The normal annual management charge and the applicable fund management charges on your existing Legal & General pension pot(s) will apply to any pension pot(s) you transfer over. Please see your Member booklet and scheme documentation for more information. These can be found on your scheme website.
Changing your mind
You can choose to cancel any pension transfers that haven’t started. Simply contact us using the details below.
For completed transfers you’ll have 30 days from the date of us allocating each transfer payment to cancel and ask us to
return this transfer payment to your previous plan. This money can’t be returned directly to you. The amount that we’ll
return will reflect any fall in the value of the investment fund or funds that your pension pot was invested in.
Please bear in mind that the administrators of your previous plan don’t have to accept the transfer back. If they
don’t, any money that you transferred will remain in your Legal & General plan.