Questions About Our Service

You can find the details in our Services & Fees document which you should read carefully and discuss with us if anything isn’t clear.

We will issue a ‘Personalised Charges Document’ to you which will confirm any charges you will be liable for. We will issue this once we have assessed the scope of the work we will complete. We cannot charge you any fee until you confirm acceptance of the charge.

You can get this online or over the phone.

To apply online go to www.gov.uk/check-state-pension and follow the instructions from there. You’ll need to verify your identity as part of the process, either through your Government Gateway account if you have one, or by using the GOV.UK verify service, so you will find it helpful to have one or more of the following to hand:

• A valid UK passport.
• Bank Statement showing direct debit payments.
• A P60 for the latest tax year.
• Payslips – for the last 2-3 months.
• National Insurance Number.

You may also need your mobile phone to receive a security code.

To apply by phone, call 0800 731 0175. You’ll have to do this if you are within 30 days of your State Pension age, or already over this age.

Please note we will need this forecast for your spouse / partner as well.

Once we have the information we need from your defined benefit pension scheme and any other relevant providers it usually takes us three weeks to produce our report and advice for you. That includes time for it to be checked and reviewed before we send it to you.

This depends on the advice and what it involves doing, but it generally takes between eight to ten weeks. We will be happy to give you more information about this for your particular circumstances once we’ve sent your report and advice.

Please note: Pensionhelp do not guarantee to meet any Transfer Value Expiry Dates. Our role is to provide financial advice to clients. This involves gathering information from clients and third parties. We cannot confirm suitability of advice until we have all of the information required and on occasion this means that we are unable to meet deadline dates. On occasion new transfer values will need to be obtained, schemes may charge for this, and new transfer values may be lower than existing ones. Pensionhelp accept your case to review on the basis that you understand that we do not guarantee to meet any deadline dates.

Often, if you know what you want to do with your money, you don’t need to use a financial adviser. For anything involving a potential defined benefit pension transfer though, by law you must take financial advice if your transfer value would exceed £30,000.

If you ask us to provide this advice, we have to gather enough information about your circumstances to do this properly. We won’t accept instructions from you that are against our advice or that we don’t believe are in your best interests.

Our normal policy is not to process a transaction which goes against our recommendation. In exceptional circumstances and in line with FCA rules, if you wish to proceed with a transfer against our advice, you may be able to do this.
If you elect to transfer in spite of our advice to remain in the scheme, you would be treated as an ‘insistent client’. An insistent client is an individual who has received a personal recommendation and chooses to do something other than follow the adviser’s personal recommendation.
After you have received your Full Advice Report, you will initially need to contact us to let us know that you wish to proceed in a way that differs from our advice, and the reasons why you want to do that.