Old pensions
Four old pensions, one question
Nearly everyone over 50 has pots scattered across old jobs. Whether to put them together is a real question with a real answer — and it is not the one the tidiness instinct gives you.
Nearly everyone over 50 has pots scattered across old jobs. Whether to put them together is a real question with a real answer — and it is not the one the tidiness instinct gives you.
The question arrives as housekeeping. Four statements land in four different envelopes, two of the providers have been bought by somebody else since you left, one login has stopped working, and the whole thing feels like a drawer that needs sorting out.
Underneath it there are three quite different questions wearing the same coat. Am I paying too much? Have I lost something? And can I actually see what I've got? Combining fixes the third one immediately, sometimes fixes the first, and occasionally destroys something valuable while doing it. Which is why “tidy” is a poor reason on its own.
Combining old pensions is often sensible and sometimes a serious mistake, and the difference is decided by four specific things you can check in an afternoon. None of the four is how neat the paperwork looks.
Moving a pot from one place to another changes what it costs to run and what it is invested in. It does not make it bigger on the day. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
An old personal pension from the nineties can charge well over 1% a year. A modern workplace default fund is capped at 0.75% and most sit under half of that. Over a decade that gap is real money, and it is the single strongest argument for moving anything.
Some older contracts carry a guaranteed annuity rate, or a tax-free cash entitlement above the usual 25%, or a protected pension age. Every one of those is attached to the contract, not to you. Transfer out and it is gone.
This is the underrated one. You cannot model what you cannot see. Four unknowns is why so many people have no idea whether they can stop, and a single visible number is what makes the rest of the arithmetic work.
Ignore the marketing. These are the four facts about each pot that answer the question, and you are entitled to ask for all of them in writing.
Not “competitive”, not “in line with the market” — the number. Ask for the ongoing charges figure and any separate policy or platform fee on top. A 1.4% contract sitting next to a 0.4% one is the whole argument in a single line.
Guaranteed annuity rates were written into a lot of contracts before about 1990 and can be worth two or three times what the same money buys today. Ask the provider directly: does this policy have any safeguarded or guaranteed benefits?
Since 2017 early exit charges on personal pensions are capped at 1% once you are over 55, and at nothing on newer contracts. Older occupational transfers can still carry a market value reduction. Ask for the transfer value and the fund value, and compare them.
A protected pension age below 55 survives only on a block transfer with other members, never on an individual one. Same for tax-free cash above 25%. And moving your current scheme stops your employer paying into it, which is usually the most expensive mistake on this page.
Ruth is 54 and runs a design agency with six staff. She has four pots and, until she looked, no idea what any of them cost her.
An old workplace scheme from a job she left in 2009. Ongoing charge 1.1%, which is £946 a year.
From a job she left in 2004 and had genuinely forgotten. She found it through the government's free tracing service. Charge 0.95%, or £390 a year.
A personal pension started in 1996. Charge 1.4%. It also carries a guaranteed annuity rate of 9%, which nobody had ever mentioned to her.
Her current scheme, into which the company still pays. Charge 0.4% — the cheapest thing she owns.
Pots A and B are the straightforward pair. Together they hold £127,000 and cost £1,336 a year to run. At 0.4% the same money would cost £508 — a difference of about £830 a year, today.
Now run both versions forward the thirteen years to her State Pension age, at 3% growth above inflation. Left where they are, the two pots reach roughly £163,000 in today's money. At 0.4%, roughly £177,000. The gap is a shade over £14,000 — from a decision that involves no extra saving, no extra risk and about two hours of paperwork.
The 9% guarantee on £34,000 would pay Ruth about £3,060 a year for life from 65. That guarantee is the reason the 1.4% charge exists, and giving it up to save £340 a year in fees may be a very poor trade. It may also be the right one, depending on whether she wants a fixed income at all. That calculation is a regulated recommendation, it is worth more than £30,000, and so the law requires her to take advice on it before she can transfer. Three pots, three completely different answers — which is the actual lesson.
It is one decision per pot. Ruth's four pots produced “probably move it”, “probably move it”, “take advice, this one is different” and “leave it alone, your employer is paying into it”. A single yes or no would have been wrong three times out of four.
Past returns tell you what happened to a fund, not what will. Charges are the one variable you can actually know in advance and the one that compounds against you every single year regardless of what markets do.
Around a third of the people we sit down with turn out to have a pension they had stopped counting. Finding £41,000 you had written off is worth more than any charge saving on this page, and it costs nothing but a form.
A final salary or career average pension is a promise of income for life, indexed, whatever happens to markets. It is not a pot with your name on it and it is rarely comparable. Over £30,000 you cannot transfer it without regulated advice, and that rule exists because of what happened when people could.
Most of this is admin rather than advice, and nobody needs to be paid for it. Four jobs, none of which commits you to anything.
The government's Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details is free and takes minutes. It gives you the provider's current contact details, which is usually the only wall between you and a forgotten pot. Separately, pension schemes must be connected to the new pensions dashboards by 31 October 2026, after which finding them gets considerably easier.
What is the current transfer value? What is the total annual charge as a percentage? Does the policy carry any safeguarded or guaranteed benefits? Is there any exit penalty? Put it in writing and keep the replies.
Add the four numbers together. For a lot of people this is the first time they have ever seen what they actually have, and the figure is usually larger than the one they had been carrying around in their head.
Put it into the free projection with what you spend and when you want to stop. It runs in your browser, takes about two minutes and tells you whether the pension question is the urgent one or whether something else is.
Whether your pensions are enough depends far more on what you spend than on what they cost to run. The free Healthcheck reads it off your bank in about two minutes rather than asking you to guess, and almost everybody guesses low. If money is a worry right now rather than in twenty years, start here instead — MoneyHelper, StepChange and National Debtline give free independent help today.
Two rules worth knowing, because they are law rather than anybody's opinion.
If a pension holds safeguarded benefits worth more than £30,000 — a defined benefit promise, a guaranteed annuity rate, a guaranteed minimum pension — you must take regulated advice before you can transfer it. The receiving scheme has to see confirmation that you did. Ruth's pot C falls squarely inside that rule.
And whatever you decide, nobody at Buzz can tell you which pension to move or where to move it. Financial planning is not regulated advice. We can model what different charges do to your projection over twenty years, show you what the guarantee is worth against the pot it is attached to, and tell you plainly when a decision needs a recommendation we are not permitted to give. At that point we can introduce you to Equity & General, authorised and regulated by the FCA (No. 474163) — entirely optional, no obligation, and if you become their client E&G pay Buzz a commission, which we tell you before the introduction rather than after. You can check any firm on the Financial Services Register at register.fca.org.uk.
In order, because the order matters more than people expect.
Trace the lost ones before you analyse the found ones. There is no point optimising £127,000 while £41,000 sits somewhere you have forgotten.
Charge, guarantees, exit penalty, transfer value. In writing, from the provider, before anybody offers you an opinion about them.
Run the projection. If the money lasts comfortably either way, this is housekeeping. If it doesn't, you have found the thing worth spending time on — and it may well not be the pensions.
Where the decision needs a regulated recommendation, get one. Where it doesn't, it is your call, made with the numbers in front of you. The Financial Plan puts every pot into one projection with the tax applied properly, and every assumption behind it is published.
Two related reads: what the 25% rules actually say, because protected cash above 25% is one of the things a transfer can destroy, and how much you can safely draw, which is the question all of this is really in service of.
No, and that assumption is where most of the mistakes start. It is often cheaper, because old personal pensions from the eighties and nineties commonly charge over 1% a year while a modern workplace default fund is capped at 0.75% and frequently sits nearer 0.3%. But cost is only one of four things that matter. A pot with a guaranteed annuity rate attached is expensive for a reason, and the reason may be worth several times the fee. A pot your employer is still paying into should almost never move while they are still paying into it. The right unit of decision is one pot at a time, using that pot's own numbers, not a single verdict applied to all of them.
Start with the government's free Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details. You give it the name of the employer or the provider and it returns current contact details, which is usually the only obstacle, because the firm you paid into in 1998 has probably been bought twice since. Then write to each one with your dates of employment and your National Insurance number and ask for a current statement. Old payslips, P60s and letters about scheme changes are the best clues if you cannot remember who ran it. From 31 October 2026 every scheme must be connected to the pensions dashboards, which will eventually let you see the lot in one place. Until then it is letters, and it is worth the afternoon.
It is a promise written into an older pension contract that, at a set age, your fund will convert into income at a fixed rate regardless of what rates are doing at the time. Nine per cent was not unusual on policies written before about 1990. On a £34,000 pot that means roughly £3,060 a year for life, and the current open market would have to beat that for giving it up to make sense. You would know by asking the provider one direct question in writing: does this policy carry any safeguarded or guaranteed benefits? Providers do not always volunteer it, which is exactly why people transfer out of them by accident.
Usually you can, and usually it is the wrong move while you are still employed there, because your employer pays into that scheme and stops the moment you leave it. The minimum they must contribute is 3% of qualifying earnings and many pay considerably more, which dwarfs any charge saving you might make elsewhere. Current schemes are also frequently the cheapest thing a person owns, since the default fund charge is capped at 0.75%. Some schemes do allow a partial transfer of the historic balance while contributions carry on into the same pot. That is a question for your scheme administrator, and their answer decides whether the option exists at all.
For most people, no. The normal entitlement is 25% of each pot, capped across your lifetime by the lump sum allowance of £268,275, and that follows you rather than the contract. The exception matters though. A minority of older schemes carry a protected entitlement above 25%, sometimes far above it, and that protection is attached to the policy. Transfer it individually and the protection is lost, leaving you with the standard 25%. It survives only on a block transfer, meaning two or more members moving together within set rules. It is one of the four questions worth asking every provider before you move anything.
No, and anyone unauthorised who does is breaking the law rather than doing you a favour. Recommending that you move a specific pension to a specific place is regulated advice, and Buzz Financial Planning is not authorised to give it. What we do is the arithmetic around the decision: every pot in one projection, the charges modelled over the actual years remaining, the guarantee valued against the pot it sits in, and the whole thing run to 100 with UK tax applied. That usually makes the answer obvious to you. Where it genuinely needs a recommendation we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General (FCA 474163), disclosing the commission beforehand.
The projection runs in your browser in about a minute. Nothing is sent anywhere and no email is needed to see the answer.
Thirty minutes with a planner to work out whether you need a Plan at all. Some people leave that call having been told they don't.
One written document — every year to 100 with the tax done properly, what breaks it priced in years, and the ninety days after. £1,500.