I have an old employee pension, not a great deal but mostly appears to be paying fund charges and treading water.

I would like to transfer to a low fee cost / index FTSE100

Reading up seems the best way to do this would be something like A Vanguard index via a platform called interactive investor. Has anyone used this platform?

Is it as simple as asking them to do a SIPP transfer and it all gets sorted?

Vanguard are planning to introduce SIPPs themselves – might be worth waiting for:

https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/need-help/answer/do-you-offer-a-pension-or-a-sipp

The Vanguard funds are good, but Interactive Investor will charge £10 per month for an account, plus another £10 per month for a SIPP. That’s a fixed fee, so if you have a small amount it’s probably not a good bargain.

I have an old employee pension

Defined benefit (final salary) or defined contribution?

If the former and over £30k, harder to move and probably not advisable…

Make sure you check the small print and as Footflaps says if its final salary then there are only a few circumstances where you would want to move that.

I have an III SIPP I find they are ok to deal with but I would look at charges for all the main providers and consider the size of your pot and how often you will be trading.

You can do this with Hargreaves Lansdown. Don’t have a SIPP with them (yet) but do have a stocks and shares ISA. The low cost index trackers (UK and Global) I have in that are available in their SIPP as well.

https://www.hl.co.uk/funds/index-tracker-funds

Not a DB, back of fag packet maths tells me its returning about 6% after accounting for inflation. That’s not actually that bad. Quite surprised really given its spread across 18 UTs picked in my ‘youth’

Trading wise I don’t intend to do much at all, sit tight and reinvest its a top up for my current DB which will hopefully enable me to retire a year or two earlier.

You can do this with Hargreaves Lansdown.

They are quite expensive fees wise and offer terrible advice, eg they were recommending Neil Woodfords funds to all their clients whilst selling off their own holdings in his funds as quick as they could…..

II are one of the cheapest out there at £9.99/month.

The (excellent) monevator.com website has a platform charge table to help you decide where is best / cheapest (cheapest isn’t always best but should be a important factor) of where to park your investments. IME it’s better than those produced by the telegraph or mymoney websites.

As above, for small pots, fixed fee will probably be more expensive than % based platform.

HL is 0.45% per annum, so £26k is break even with II.

Although after the Neil Woodford fiasco I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole…..

Isn’t ii £20 per month for a SIPP? That’s £52k break even

If I had under £50K I would normally be looking at HL or AJ Bell to keep fees low, but I agree with footflaps and would avoid HL

Yes, it is as simple as you describe if under 30k. I recently moved c20k from a old employee scheme to bestinvest and did a mix of UK, US trackers and a spread of vanguard. Cant say its performing that well yet, but nice to be able to control it easily.

would avoid HL

The SIPP created by my company is in HL so I was in it before the Woodford thing.  Anyway, the three funds in it are at 30%, 18% and 1.6% growth over 7, 4 and 1 year respectively.  Look at history and the trend is of constant growth in general over 20 years or so.   Seems ok to me.