Pension freedom: ‘I wanted access to my savings but delays cost me £20,000'

It isn’t as easy to get your hands on your cash, warns Martin Baker

How about this for a technical difficulty? I am, or would be, a pensioner – albeit one who will never stop working. But there is an inconvenient truth: I couldn't get my hands on my own money – a pension fund worth well in excess of £100,000 into which I have saved over the past 19 years.

Like any story, mine needs to be understood in context. The fund I'm alluding to is one of several pension pots I've built up over a 33-year working life as a lawyer, writer and journalist. With a pluralistic, fast-changing career, I knew in my mid-30s that the only real pension provider in my life would be me. So in 1996, returning to London after a seven-year stint in Paris as an investment editor for a newspaper, I put £4,000 into a pension plan linked to an investment trust, with a further monthly subscription of £200.

Despite the best efforts of a bank that occasionally didn't pay the standing order and didn't see fit to tell me (take a bow, Cater Allen Private Bank), I sustained that level of contribution until this summer. The fund did well: at one stage, it reached £120,000. This was the level at which I tried to get out.

But getting out of a pension really isn't that easy, as I'll explain.

I'm 56 years old, and as a director of a financial technology company and founder of three other digital businesses, I was overjoyed when the George Osborne pension reforms were introduced. Those "freedoms", as some call them, came into play – theoretically – in April this year.

And they were rich in promise, abolishing the nasty, closed-shop obligation to take your pension pot at retirement and invest at least 75 per cent of it in an annuity, or guaranteed income for life. I have always disliked annuities – I see them as laden with charges and heavily dependent on interest rates. They weren't great value when rates were high, and in today's environment they simply suck.

My plan was simple. I'd cash in my pension, take 25 per cent tax-free, as I'm allowed to do, and put most of it and the rest of the cash into a peer-to-peer crowdfunding scheme. Some of the best P2P services offer a gross yield of 8 per cent.

Yes, I'd have a tax bill on £90,000 of my money, but there would be a first-year return of £10,000 or so to set off against that. I had also had the benefit of tax relief on my upfront pension contributions and the fund, managed by JP Morgan, had done well.

So tax issues are what today's digital natives call #FirstWorldProblems.

But getting at the money has proved an expensive nightmare. The alarm bells started ringing when JP Morgan sent me a letter in the spring saying, in essence, that it wasn't going to the Osborne pension freedom funfair.

The bank then issued a statement in the summer: "Whilst we remain fully committed to providing excellent service to our existing direct clients, this transition reflects our decision to focus on our core strength in fund management."

Meanwhile, the Government was making it clear to the financial services industry that due diligence had to be done on those seeking their freedom. Some bureaucrat had clearly decided that hordes of grey-haired sensation seekers would take their cash and blow it on sports cars and world cruises.

In May, I made the first of several visits to an independent financial adviser – and the due-diligence box was ticked to enable the transfer of my funds to another pension provider that would let me cash in my investment. (Had I simply saved up – and pensions are no more than our savings in the form of deferred pay – I could have had the money in a few working days. Not so with a pension fund.)

The advice – I negotiated a flat fee of £1,500 for this; those First World problems again – was to switch the investment to a Fidelity self-administered pension scheme. Fidelity is one of the few firms prepared to help us get our money.

After encashing a pension plan, the most you can put into a new one is £10,000 a year. My thinking was to do that, after getting my hands on the cash. I waited a little, as I wanted to time my exit. In July I made the call, and my adviser told me the paperwork had gone off to Fidelity.

I've had investments with the firm over the years, and it has always been efficient and courteous. But, as a consequence of playing ball and help realise pension freedom, it is suffering a massive backlog. By the time the trigger was pulled on the transfer, the fund value had fallen to just under £105,000, with the redemption occurring around the year's low for shares.

I am now down on several fronts: a fee to a financial adviser of £1,500; a mistimed redemption that has reduced the value of my capital by £15,000; and lost income of at least £3,000 if I had invested it in a P2P loan portfolio.

But all that said, I'm still better off than if I had been forced to buy an annuity.