Moving UK Royal London pension to Ireland

Summer Haze

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Have a UK pension with Royal London and trying to move it here to avail of tax relief. Working through a financial advisor, letters of consent etc signed and returned to allow the Financial adviser to act on our behalf, although Royal London don’t seem to be playing ball. This has been going on since February 2021 and we are no further forward. Does this process usually take this long? Any tips or advice?
 
Have a UK pension with Royal London and trying to move it here to avail of tax relief. Working through a financial advisor, letters of consent etc signed and returned to allow the Financial adviser to act on our behalf, although Royal London don’t seem to be playing ball. This has been going on since February 2021 and we are no further forward. Does this process usually take this long? Any tips or advice?

In our experience a lot of the arguments put forward to move a pension from the U.K. to Ireland fall away under scrutiny and you are usually left with the primary motivation is a commission payment to a broker with little benefit to yourself or you can even make things worse in some cases.

I can’t see why you need to move your U.K. pension to avail of tax relief.

if you are living and working in Ireland you simply need an Irish pension. You can in some instances continue to pay in to a foreign pension and claim Irish tax relief.

if you move the U.K. pension to an Irish buy out bond and retire the benefits within 5 years you will be hit with a 55% tax charge in the UK

if the growth on your U.K. pension plus the Irish pension exceeds €2m in total then you pay an effective rate of tax of 71% on the excess. Whereas if you leave it in the U.K. you only pay excess tax over 3 million.

these are just specific examples of why you need to tread carefully here. They might not all apply to you but you need to work with a firm that really know what they are doing and not just motivated by a commission.

my own experience is set out in detail in this post

 
UK pensions may only be moved out of the UK into foreign (i.e. Irish) pension products which meet strict criteria. The UK pension trustees must satisfy themselves that the receiving pension does in fact meet these criteria, before the will allow it to be transferred, as this is unlikely to be an everyday task it can take some time.

I would echo Marc above, why would you want to do this ?
 
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