Fernleigh Wearden & Company Ltd
Independent Financial Advisers
Four fields. That’s it.
One of our advisers will ring you back by the end of the next working day, at the time you asked for.
In a hurry? Call us on 01772 864314, 9am–5pm Monday to Friday.
For individuals
The average worker will have eleven jobs. Most leave a pension behind at each one and very few ever look at them again.
Overview
If you move jobs, your pension becomes your own responsibility. Nobody writes to remind you and the provider has no particular incentive to.
We start by tracing everything, including the ones you have forgotten. Then we look at three things for each: what you are paying, what it is invested in and whether it carries any benefit that would be lost by moving.
That last one matters more than people expect. Older schemes sometimes carry guaranteed annuity rates or protected tax-free cash worth considerably more than any saving from consolidating. We check before we recommend anything.
Most employer schemes have low charges but a limited range of funds and no flexi-access drawdown. Whether that matters depends entirely on your situation and how close you are to taking the money.
Advice areas
We start by tracing everything, including the pensions you have forgotten. We may ask for your job history to help us locate lost pensions.
We review the scheme in detail. Some of the things we think are important are:
What you pay the pension company every year. Every scheme has charges, but do you know whether yours are competitive?
Which funds you actually hold and the charges of that investment on a yearly basis. These sit on top of the scheme charges above.
Measured against its peers — other similar funds with the same company and also with other providers.
Guaranteed annuity rates, protected tax-free cash, a protected pension age. Occasionally worth far more than any saving.
Whether the scheme allows drawdown, phased withdrawals or partial transfers. A good many older ones do not.
Who receives it and how tax-efficiently. Frequently the paperwork has never been completed at all.
Quick calculator
Set your pot and timescale to see roughly what it might be worth. The gap between providers is usually charges rather than skill.
Your figures
Illustration only, using a 5% middle growth assumption with 2% and 8% as lower and higher scenarios, less 1.2% a year in charges, in line with the approach used for regulatory projections. These are assumptions chosen for illustration, not a forecast and not based on the past performance of any fund we recommend. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. The value of investments can fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you put in.
Working with us
Nothing is committed until step five and the first two cost you nothing but time.
A chat, at our office, your home or over video. We listen, you ask questions. There is no charge and no obligation and if we can't help we'll say so.
What you have, what you owe, what you want and how you feel about risk. This is the part most people find surprisingly useful in itself.
We review your existing plans, charges and funds against the whole of the market. Being independent means nothing is off the table.
A written report in plain English setting out what we suggest, what it costs and why. You take it away and think about it.
Only once you're happy. We handle the paperwork, the providers and the chasing, which is usually the tedious bit.
If you'd like us to, we'll review everything at least once a year and tell you honestly if nothing needs changing.
Who you’d be dealing with
Pensions are Mark’s specialism. As a Chartered Financial Planner and Fellow of the Personal Finance Society he is the most qualified of the three and generally takes the more complex cases.
In their words
I have been a client of Fernleigh Wearden & Company for a number of years and have always found them to be most helpful in advising me on my investments and placing them where they would be most beneficial to me.
I received very helpful and in depth advice and service from Mark at Fernleigh Wearden & Company. He was always on hand to answer any questions I had for him. Excellent advice and I would definitely recommend him to anyone needing advice with their pensions.
Mark and Paul always provide an excellent and personal service. They are highly recommended.
Often relevant alongside this
Once you know what you have, the question becomes when you can stop.
Read more Try itSee what those pots actually support, year by year.
Read more Worth readingFree introductory call. Recommendation reports from £795.
Read moreCommon questions
Usually, yes. Between old paperwork, your National Insurance record and the Government’s Pension Tracing Service, most pots can be located. Bring whatever you have, however incomplete.
No. It is tidier, which people like, but tidiness is not a financial benefit. If an old scheme has lower charges or a valuable guarantee, moving it makes you worse off. We check each one on its own merits.
The first meeting is free. If we carry out a full review and recommend no change, our normal charges apply for the work — we’ll agree that with you before we start and we’ll say at the outset if we think a review is unlikely to be worth it.
We no longer advise on transferring out of defined benefit schemes. We’ll tell you that immediately rather than after you’ve paid for a review and refer you to a firm that holds the permission.
Gathering the information is the slow part. Once you ask us to review an existing pension or investment, we have to write to each provider and obtain written confirmation of what you hold. That typically takes four to six weeks and occasionally as long as twelve, depending entirely on how quickly the provider replies.
We do all the chasing, but we cannot make a provider answer faster than it chooses to. The analysis and recommendation, once we have the facts, is much quicker.
This is one of the most common misconceptions we hear. A pension you have stopped paying into is not frozen — it stays invested and continues to rise and fall with markets. It is generally only at or after your chosen retirement date that some schemes move you into cash.
So an old pot is still working, for better or worse. That is precisely why it is worth knowing what it is invested in.
Yes, though if it is your current workplace scheme you will usually want to keep contributing to it to retain the employer contribution. A review can still improve the fund choice within it.
Please read this
Fernleigh Wearden no longer advises on transfers out of defined benefit, or “gold-plated”, schemes.
Both Mark and Paul are qualified in this area and able to advise on it should the firm wish to do so again. At this time the regulator starts from the position that staying in a final salary scheme is in the best interests of the majority of people and as such we have decided to put our permissions on hold to advise in this area.
If you hold a final salary pension we can provide a triage service to generically explain the details of the pension you hold and the alternative options available to you.
Should you believe that a defined benefit pension transfer is in your best interests, we will point you towards a service such as the PFS adviser search or unbiased.co.uk to find an adviser who holds the relevant permissions.
We will still happily review everything else you have.
Our services
Advice areas overlap. Part of our job is spotting which ones actually apply to you.
Tell us when suits and an adviser will ring you back. The introductory call is free.
