Barclays Wealth

Pension Consolidation

Most people, during their career, accumulate a number of different pension plans. Yet maintaining separate plans can be laborious and complicated - and may lead to lost investment opportunities, exposure to undue risk and higher costs.

Barclays Wealth can help you avoid these problems by working with you to consolidate your retirement funds (including any protected rights funds you may have) into one pension wrapper.

As part of our approach, we will:

• Help you review your existing pension plans
• Identify and fill any funding gaps
• Define the right asset mix for you
• Develop the investment solution and retirement strategy that best suits your needs.

The advantages of consolidating your pension with Barclays Wealth include:

• It can make managing your pensions easier and less time-consuming
  With only one plan to keep track of, monitoring the performance of your pension fund is simpler and quicker.
• We can ensure that your overall asset allocation is consistent with your goals and attitude to risk
  With many plans to maintain, it can be difficult to assess whether you have the right asset mix, or if your investments are too cautious or too risky.
• It becomes much clearer whether your level of contributions and overall retirement funds are appropriate
  We help ensure that you'll have enough to meet your goals, and it's easier to assess any tax liability.
• You can remove plans that are inconsistent, inflexible or inappropriate to your needs
  In favour of a single plan that's best for you.
• It's more cost-effective
  You pay only one set of management charges, rather than separate charges for a multitude of plans.

Issues to consider

The potential benefits of consolidating your pensions won't apply to everyone, and there may be drawbacks to moving your pension plans - particularly so for certain types of pension. It is therefore vitally important to carefully consider all aspects of your existing pensions before making a decision as to whether or not to consolidate. As well as whether the total size of your pension funds make consolidation viable, Issues to take into account include whether your existing pensions have:

• Loyalty bonuses
• Early termination penalties
• Guaranteed annuity rates
• Integrated life cover or other additional benefits
• Final salary pension benefits

Find out more about pension consolidation

To discover how Barclays Wealth could help you save for your retirement, please contact us and we'll be in touch as soon as possible.

Tax treatment will depend on an individual's personal circumstances and may change in the future. Barclays Wealth does not provide tax advice. If in doubt we recommend you obtain your own independent tax and legal advice tailored to your individual circumstances.

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