QROPS advice busted!

Shutterstock

When will it ever end? Just when you thought you could take things a bit easier and start relaxing you now find that there are a number of issues with the QROPS arrangement you had set up to receive your UK pension.

Having neatly sidestepped all those advertisements that were too good to be true you know the ones offering you 100% of your pension fund in cash or the option of cashing in your funds at age 40 or some other ridiculously early age and the ones that promised to get rid of the 55% death charge from day one, you now find yourself in possibly an even greater dilemma.

You see your financial advisor had recommended that you invest your retirement plans in a number of unregulated and dubious funds and now when you look at your statement you can hardly believe what you see, an investment that has been decimated by funds being placed in suspension or worse still in liquidation with very little prospect of ever recovering the original investment. Not only has your future retirement planning been jeopardised but your immediate access to income has probably been thwarted too.

It´s a massive blow you say but then surely you can make a formal complaint against the firm because you never agreed this ambitious investment strategy, which you were told was low risk anyway, then seek redress from the equivalent of the Financial Services Ombudsman.

Now this is where it can start to get extremely messy. Some firms will try to deny advisors ever worked for them and some companies that puport to be highly regulated and properly run whilst at the same time they have a loose arrangement with so called pension experts and other entities, might deny that they are responsible for policing their appointed representatives or network members when it comes to the crunch.

Some firms just take your retirement planning business and when the heat is on disappear off the face of the earth then resurface in another jurisdiction where the regulatory framework is of a lighter touch or possibly non-existent.

What can you do? Well it just depends and each case will be very different. Of course if the firm is UK regulated then there is a possibility that you can seek redress in the UK but more often than not it can be considerably more complicated, particularly when there is a lack of paperwork and documentation.

The retirement planning team at Fiduciary Wealth have had some success in helping clients seek redress for missold QROPS pensions. It´s not quick and it´s not easy and it would have been a lot better if you had taken a properly regulated advice in the first instant but in some cases it might be possible to seek some compensation against the company that agreed your pension. Unfortunately this type of advice gives us all a bad name and we all get tarred with the same brush despite the very obvious differences. Speak to one of our financial planners to see if they can help.

Call us in confidence on 900 102 374

Or email at enquiries@fiduciarywealth.eu

Or visit www.fiduciarywealth.eu

Author badge placeholder
Written by

Euro Weekly News Media

Share your story with us by emailing newsdesk@euroweeklynews.com, by calling +34 951 38 61 61 or by messaging our Facebook page www.facebook.com/EuroWeeklyNews

Comments