Consolidating company pensions
Have you shopped around?  I would agree that the fees seem high.   The first question I would ask if if the .75% management fee is per year or per month?  If it is per month, you will almost certainly lose money each year.   A quick search shows that Fidelity will allow one to transfer their pensions into a self directed account.  Here in the US, where we have 401Ks, it is almost always better to transfer them into something self directed once you leave an employer.  Fidelity makes it really easy, and I always recommend them.  (No affiliation.) Here in the US they actually pay you for you transferring money into your account.  This can come in the form of free stock trades or money added to your account. I would encourage you to give them or their competitors a look in order to make an informed decision.  Often times, a person with lowish balances, can't really afford to pay those high management fees.  You might need in the 10s of millions before something like that makes sense. "I've been down the consolidation route too (of a handful of DC pensions; the DB ones I've not touched, and you would indeed need advice to move those around). What you should be comparing against is: what's the cheapest possible thing you could be doing?  Monevators' online platform list will give you an idea of SIPP costs (if your pot is big enough and you're a buy-and-hold person, ATS' flat-fee model means costs can become arbitrarily close to zero percent), and if you're happy to be invested in something like Vanguard Lifestrategy, Target Retirement or vanilla index trackers then charges on those will be something like 0.1%-0.4%.  Savings of 0.5-1.0% per year add up over pension saving timescales, but only you can decide whether whatever extra the adviser is offering vs. a more DIY approach is worth it for you. Are you absolutely sure that 0.75% pa fee isn't on top of whatever charges are built into the funds he'll invest you in?  For the £1000 fee, advisers claim to have high costs per customer because of ""regulatory burdens""; this is why there's talk of an ""advice gap"" these days: if you only have a small sum to invest, the fixed costs of advice become intolerable.  IMHO, nutmeg are still quite expensive for what they offer too (although still probably cheaper than any ""advised"" route)."
Thanks for your thorough reply.   Basically, I found a case study in one of my old finance workbooks from school and am trying to complete it.   So it's not entirely complicated in the sense of a full LBO or merger model.   That being said, the information that they provide is Year 1 EBITDA for TargetCo and BuyerCo and a Pro-Forma EBITDA for the consolidated company @ Year 1 and Year 4 (expected IPO). I was able to get the Pre-Money and Post-Money values and the Liquidation values (year 4 IPO), as well as the number of shares.   I can use EBITDA to get EPS (ebitda/share in this case) for both consolidated and stand-alone @ Year 1, but can only get EPS for consolidated for all other years. Given the information provided. One of the questions I have is do I do anything with my liquidation values for an accretion/dilution analysis or is it all EPS? The benefit of paying into a pension is that the payment is effectively made from pre-tax money. Either you pay from your own pocket and then you get income tax relief on the payment, i.e. your gross salary is reduced by the gross pension contribution and income tax is recalculated with the excess either refunded to you or put in your pension (the details are a bit more complicated depending on your marginal tax rate, but the end result is the same). Or your company pays, and then you are never charged tax on the payment in the first place. From the company's point of view, the two are roughly the same. Either it pays you who then pays into your pension, or it pays straight into your pension. Either way the money going out from the company is treated as a cost that is offset against the company's revenue, reducing the amount of corporation tax the company has to pay. There are some National Insurance advantages to paying directly into the pension; neither you nor the company gets relief on NI if the payment goes via you, but no NI is paid in the first place if it goes direct from the company. [EDIT: your question is actually worded to suggest that you want to lend your company money from your own pocket, and then have that loan directly discharged by the company paying into your pension. That's no different to you just paying into your pension directly, and wouldn't have any better tax implications. For the rest of my answer, I assume that the idea is actually to lend your company money that it uses to make an immediate contribution to your pension (as part of your pay from that company), and then the company will repay the loan later by returning the money to you personally. Your pension and you are two separate entities legally.] However, in your case, what you're proposing is that the company should effectively make a loss paying into your pension: it's going to end up with more costs than revenue. So, there won't be any immediate tax saving because there wasn't revenue to pay corporation tax on in the first place. You also won't save tax because the loan will be made from previously taxed income or whatever.  However, there will be a tax loss that can be carried forward and offset against future profits, so if you expect the company to make money in future to repay the loan, you might end up saving some corporation tax. You can also sometimes carry a tax loss back one year, so if your company had profits last year you could get some corporation tax back immediately. The repayment of the loan itself won't be subject to income tax as it's not income. So unless you can carry the loss back, you won't get any immediate tax relief by doing this, but it might give you a way to carry forward your annual allowance to future years, i.e. use it now and get the tax advantage later. However, the annual allowance can already be carried forward by up to three years, so this is only worthwhile if you expect that future revenue to repay the loan to arrive more than three years later. Also, this is only worthwhile if you'll continue to max out the annual allowance for paying into your pension in future years, otherwise you might as well just make the pension payment using that same revenue in future years. However, even if this beneficial tax-wise, I'm not sure if it's actually allowed; this might be viewed as an artificial transaction to avoid tax, and that could lead to HMRC disallowing the future tax relief. You might need to ask HMRC or an accountant about that. If you do make the loan, make sure it's clearly documented so you can show in future why the repayment shouldn't be treated as income. "In addition to dpassage's excellent advice on dealing with your debt in the most efficient manner, you may also want to consider Consumer Credit Counseling Services (CCCS). These are non-profit agencies (free or low-cost) that can work with you and your creditors to come up with payment plans and sometimes negotiate lower interest rates to help you get out from under the debt. You should definitely avoid for-profit ""debt consolidation"" companies, but the National Foundation for Credit Counseling can refer you to non-profit services in your area." Defined Benefit Plans: Defined benefit plans are disappearing because of their high cost to the companies that provide them.  When an employee retires, the company must pay his pension for the rest of his life, even longer if the pension includes a survivor option.  Thus the company's financial burden grows as more employees retire.   By law, they must provide a fund that has sufficient resources to pay all present and future pensions.  Low interest rates, such as we have now, place a greater burden on the amount that must be in these funds.   For these reasons, most companies, including large ones like IBM and Lockheed Martin, have discontinued their pension plans and provide only defined contribution plans.   Defined Contribution Plans: These require the company to only make contributions while the employee is working.  Once the employee retires, the company's responsibility ends.  Usually these plans employ a 401K type savings plan for which the employee contributes and the companies matches some or all of that contribution.  Comparison: Although a fully company paid pension plan is the best, it is now almost unavailable.  The defined contribution plan, if it includes company matching, can be a viable alternative if the investments are chosen wisely and perform as expected.  Of course, this is not guaranteed but is probably the best option that most working people have at this time. My perspective is from the US. Many employers offer 401(k)s and you can always contribute to an IRA for either tax deferred or tax free investment growth. If you're company offers a 401(k) match you should always contribute the maximum amount they max or you're leaving money on the table.    Companies can't always support pensions and it isn't the best idea to rely on one entirely for retirement unless your pension is from the federal government.   Even states such as Illinois are going through extreme financial difficulties due to pension funding issues. It's only going to get worse and if you think pension benefit accrual isn't going to be cut eventually you'll have another thing coming. I'd be worried if I was a state employee in the middle of my career with no retirement savings outside of my pension.   Ranting: Employees pushed hard for some pretty absurd commitments and public officials let the public down by giving in. It seems a little crazy to me that someone can work for the state until they're in their 50's and then earn 70% of their 6 figure salary for the rest of their life. Something needs to be done but I'd be surprised if anyone has the political will to make tough choices now before thee options get much much worse and these states are forced to make a decision. "Pretty simple actually. This is a state-run defined benefit plan, where the benefit is calculated based on the length of the employment and the contributed amounts. This is what in the US is known as the Social Security.  This is a defined contribution plan, where the employee can chose the level of risk based on certain pre-defined investment guidelines (more conservative or more aggressive). In Poland, it appears that there's a certain amount of the state-mandated SS tax is transferred to these plans. Nothing in the US is like that, but you can see it as a mandatory IRA with a preset limited choice of mutual funds to invest into, as an analogy. The recent change was to reduce the portion of the madatory contribution that is diverted to this plan from 7+% to 2.3% (on account of expanding the contribution to (1)). Probably the recent crashes of the stock markets that affected these accounts lead to this decision. This is voluntary defined contribution plan, similar to the US 401Ks. This division is actually pretty common, not unique to Poland. I'd say its the ""standard"" pension scheme, as opposed to what we're used to in the US." Assuming no debt, as you've specified in the comments to your question, the assets should generally be distributed proportional to ownership share.  BUT, without any sort of agreement, there might be contention on what each investor's share is and that might get fought out in court.  With a corporation issuing shares, the corporate charter probably defines the relationship between different classes of shares (or specifies only one class).  For a partnership though, you could conceivable have people making claims of ownership stake based on labor in addition to any cash that they put up.  Messy if there's no up-front agreement. I happen to be one such person. When I looked at what I was being offered for a lump sum, then shopped around to see what annuity I could replace it with, the difference between retail and wholesale was blindingly obvious. GM was offering me the wholesale cost (or less), while all the replacement annuities (retail prices) were offering me 1/2 the monthly payment that I'm expecting from the GM pension.   After the financial market's meltdown in 2008 lost me between 45 and 55% of my mutual funds' values (some lost more than others), I no longer have the fantasy belief that I can do better managing my money than professional investors. Learning that lesson cost me about $75k - which is several times the amount that I was offered for a buy out. As someone in my 50s, I am far more concerned about outliving my money than I am concerned about having a larger stash of chips. I won't be making $100k/year forever, as age discrimination in software development is widespread, and all the developers I personally know who are older than me, they all mention hitting brick walls getting hired when they hit 54-55 years old.   You may notice from the article that this is only for the salaried workers. The hourly workers are due to be shafted some other way.