Investing with your pension sounds like a great idea - We all love the idea of making more money and making our life more financially secure.
Make sure you always double check facts, figures and the advice you receive, it may not always be in your favour.
Never rush into any decision or feel pressured to do so, you work hard in your life and save for your pension, you wouldn't want it to disappear faster than it took you to accumulate it.
There are unsavoury people out there who just want the easy way to making money, taking your hard earned money and leaving you stuck in a financial mishap.
According to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), mis-sold pensions led to compensation payouts for over £40m in 2018. This is more than the previous year in 2017, this unfortunately shows a rise in good hard working people being scammed.
In 2014 £5.4bn of investors pensions were moved to Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPP), in 2018 we had a massive £37bn pensions moved. This shows that people are becoming more open to using there pensions to make more money or invest in a viable business idea.
This is all great but we have to remember, there is a great deal of people out there who lost there pension or become a victim of misleading companies or scammers due to mis-advice.
The FSCS have set a maximum sum of £50,000 per claim but this is due to rise to £85,000 per claim in April and could even rise even further due to the sheer amount of fraudulent claims being put through.
If your claim is larger than £50,000, then you can take your case to the Financial Ombudsman (FOS), according to the FSCS the FOS have the ability to raise the amount you can be awarded in compensation and add another £150,000 to the final claimed amount.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) proposed to increase the award limit for complaints made to Financial Ombudsman (FOS) from £150,000 to £350,000 if the complaint is made after 1st April 2019.
If you complaint to the FOS is before the 1st April 2019 then the compensation that can be claimed will be capped at £160,000.
Amit Patel, Strax Capital Legal Limited
If you have a query, need some help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at info@straxcapital or call us on 02031517150.