Mis-sold pensions are becoming all the rage lately. Back in 2019, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that Prudential failed to tell people the facts about the annuities they were selling. It was considered a serious breach that resulted in an average of £6,300 being refunded to over 17,000 customers.
Let’s face it–who wouldn’t love an injection of £6,300 in cash?
If you think that you may have been mis-sold a pension product in the past then it’s worth checking up on how your pension is doing. Unfortunately, pensions are a product aimed at seniors which means it’s very easy to trick them and lead them to buy certain products that benefit their financial advisors.
But how does it happen in the first place?
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Why people can be mis-sold a pension
We mentioned it already, but one of the most common reasons is because people simply don’t understand their pension. It sounds like a strange thing, but keep in mind that financial advisors are trusted for their expertise and the advice they offer. Unfortunately, some of these advisors abuse the trust that people put in them. This allows them to easily persuade you to invest in certain things and take risks that would benefit them, but not necessarily you.
For example, some of the most common mis-sold pensions include self-invested personal pensions (SIPP), final salary transfers and occupational pension schemes. These are good examples of products that you need to be extremely careful with because they can easily be used as part of scandals such as the Prudential situation.
So if you think you’ve been mis-sold a pension, it’s vital that you seek proper impartial advice. But what’s this about a time limit? Is there really a certain amount of time to make a claim?
Unfortunately, yes.
Act quickly if you’ve been mis-sold a pension
If you want to complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service then you have six years to make a claim from the date you were sold the product. However, you also have three years from the date that you noticed that something was wrong. The later of the two will be your timeframe.
In other words, if you think you were mis-sold insurance around 5 years ago, you only have another year to make a claim before they won’t be able to help you. If you were sold the product over 6 years ago then you could make the argument that you didn’t know until just recently. However, you’ll need to prove that you only recently noticed that something was wrong.
Either way, you absolutely need to get in touch with an expert as soon as possible to ensure the greatest chance of success with your claim.