fund value

I had posted a few months back looking for advice about changing my pension arrangements and got some good advice....

Now looking for some more...

I changed my personal pension with a very large irish institution that shall remain namesless to paid up status and joined co pension.

The value of the paid up fund (at time of paid up status as 50K) but has dropped dramatically over the past few months-I know markets are in turmoil and losses have been well documented, but should a fund drop 15% over the course of a 3 month period.....?

I am contacting them tomorrow but was looking for some advice before I did...?

Any help appreciated...

JohnA68 said:

but should a fund drop 15% over the course of a 3 month period.....?

Click to expand...

Of course this is possible. What exactly was it invested in?

it was invested in a personal pensio fund provided by Ark Life?
I did stop payments and changed to paid up staus so i presume management charges are still applied every month, and with stock markets the way there are there are going to be losses in value....I didn't think by that much though...?

I presume there is no other option than just sitting tight?

Management charges are annual charges but usually (always?) reflected in the daily unit prices. Are you sure that no other ongoing charges (e.g. monthly policy fee etc.) apply that would be paid for by automatic encashment of units as required?

Other options include switching to another fund, another pension provider etc. but whether or not this would be a good idea depends on more info than you have posted.

If you post the name of the specific Ark Life fund that you're invested in, you may get more comments.

Great thanks, I thought I couldn't name specific policies here. Will check tonight and post details here. Thanks very much for the comments so far....

All it says on on statement is "Regular Premium Portfolio Statement" - 2 policies are listed as "AIB Personal Pension Plans"?

Value in Oct was 49K, now value listed as €43K...

What additional info should I post / should I ask of Ark Life to get a bit more advice on here?

That doesn't clarify what specific fund(s) the money is invested in I don't think. Unless there is some default investment strategy that somebody knows about and from which the funds invested in can be inferred?

I'm pretty sure it's a "Managed II" fund, found an old 1998 statement and I had scribbed Managed 2 on it....this is listed as a Fund on Ark Life but can't find a history of the fund value for the last year, just a unit value for yesterday.

The performance figures of Ark Life funds can be found on the Hibernian Investment Managers website

[broken link removed]

Looking at the link that boaber posted, the Ark Life Managed Fund 2 dropped by 4.1% over a 3-month period to 2/1/2008. Now this 3-month period doesn't coincide with your 3-month period, but I don't think that such a discrepancy will make the difference between 4.1% and 15%.

I'd ring Ark Life and ask them to clarify exactly where the difference came from. Don't be fobbed off by vague references to market turmoil - print off boaber's linked page for ammunition.

It occurs to me that sometimes pension companies quote "nominal values" which presume you're leaving the fund with them until retirement and sometimes they quote "surrender values" which assume you're transferring the fund somewhere else. The latter can often be lower than the former if there are penalties imposed for transferring elsewhere. This may or may not be the case here.