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Name: Edward

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Poor performing funds with the default pension option invested in one of their worst.

1
Of the 179 Royal London funds analysed 64.3% rated as poor performing 1 or 2-star funds. https://www.yodelar.com/insights/royal-london-review Most of their funds are actively managed and fail to beat the benchmark whilst charging you activley managed fees. Moreover, the default option for pensioners is one of their governed portfolios (depending on how long you are from retirement) which have performed simply awfully. I'm 41 years from retirement and so should be looking to take a fair amount of risk and I've been stuck in governed portfolio 4 with a 5 year average annual return of 6% ish. Compare this to the 5 year return of the S&P 500 of 15%+ over the same time period (at the time of writing 30/4/21) this is simply a terrrible option from Royal London. Moreover, the fees available to put your money in the S&P 500 are as low as 0.07% (from Vangaurd and others) whereas RL charge an astonishing 1% (at their cheapest!) for you to lose money relative to the benchmark. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some strategy to put the majority of pensions in these low performing funds to keep them afloat as the fund managers continue to lose you money relative to the benchmark. Do your due diligence and check their fund performance for yourself: https://www.royallondon.com/pensions/investment-options/investment-performance/ And please please if you do chose RL (or have no choice) edit your pension away from the default option into one of the high performing tracker funds. If it's a tracker fund the fund managers can't actively lose you money and then charge you for doing so! :) Reviewed on: 30th April 2021
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Edward