| Product: |
Abbey Life Pension Schemes |
| Date: |
08/05/07 (4508 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: none
Disadvantages: the lot
well abbey life the money i was paying in at the end of the year there was less. at one point £20,000 now about £6000 was told how well there performance was. well that turned out to be wrong. phoned them and they were about as helpfull as there performance. wish i had never heard of them. trying now to get my money out without to much charges. there charges to the account are high
Summary: get your money out
|
Last comments:
 |
- 29/06/07 It was actually 4 years, not 2 years. Either way it was 24,000 pounds - that's why i'm so upset. |
 |
- 29/06/07 I had a very bad experience with AbbeyLife some years ago, something which is still not resolved to this day.
I was a contractor and was sold/pushed a company pension scheme for my limited company of which i was the only director. I was 21 at the time and quite naive about the whole process which was obviously very attractive to this guy. I was planning to pay a couple of hundred pounds in, whatever was allowed as a %age of my salary at the time.
He then phones me to say he's found this great loophole whereby I can pay £500/month which would be great because I could grow the fund much quicker. Great, I thought - I can pay more than I normally would so i'll get a better pension out of it.
However, what he didn't tell me was that if I ever reduced my payments (in times when cashflow wasn't so good) I would get penalised!! I would have to pay fees based on a percentage of what I was paying and what I would be paying. Of course, because of his 'advice' I started paying the maximum possible. It wasn't until I wanted to reduce my payments that I found out about the fees.
Since then I have had all sorts of problems trying to get my money back, or even just move the policy so that I can carry on with it. Every time I phoned Abbey a different person would tell me different things. One person told me that under a new rule called "deportability" I could turn it into a personal pension and pay what I wanted into it. The next person tells me there is no such thing and it has to remain a company policy.
I was told that if I moved the policy I would have to pay the admin fees for the next 30 years in one go thereby reducing the value of my policy to about 10% of what I had paid in. When I likened this to changing phone suppliers and BT charging me line rental for the next 30 years the staff, unsurprisingly, had nothing to say... the usual "it's company policy" line reared its ugly head.
The last time I tried to get any sense out of them was a few years ago so I am going to try again and see if I can't get at least some of my money back. I paid into this scheme for 2 years at 500/month. They have got 24,000 pounds of my money and there seems to be no way that I can get to it.
This whole situation has completely put me off pensions and as such I now have no way of preparing for my future that I can have confidence in. Yet the government tries to tells us all the time how we should prepare for the future. How, when we can't trust the companies that are supposed to look after our pensions?? |
 |
- 09/05/07 Anything linked to shares may rise or fall in value. Really there's nothing here to help a would-be purchaser of an AbbeyLife pension. Sorry. You say charges are high, how high? How did you come to purchase this scheme rather than any other? |
|
Deutschland 
España 
Italia 
France - 
