bigbenjyp

Hello All,

Looking for some advice...........

Back in the pre-Brexit days of 2015 when the pound was still nice and strong I decided to transfer both mine and my wife's British pension pots over to Canada.

Standard Life, who we were with in the UK, put us in touch with a local IFA here in Toronto who was very helpful and extremely responsive and arranged for us to transfer our pensions in to a Manulife QROPS fund over here. I knew that the fees on the mutual funds in the Canadian QROPS fund were high at around 4% per year, but the IFA assured me that we would only have to keep our funds in that particular scheme for 5 years, and then would be free to move them elsewhere.

Fast forward 4 years, and the helpful IFA is now nowhere to be seen. He barely responds to my calls and e-mails, and when he does bother to reply his information is useless. He'll of course be getting his annual commission off our cash!

So I thought I would look around at other QROPS (I believe they are now called ROPS) pension schemes and see if I could find one with low fees that are based on Index funds that just track the markets. The type of thing that Wealthsimple and some of the other robo-advisors offer. Much to my dismay I then read that HMRC have now de-listed all ROPS schemes in Canada!!

So not sure what to do. As my current RRSP scheme is now no longer a ROPS scheme, does it really matter anymore if I transfer it to another non-ROPS RRSP? If HMRC ever do come looking for me, I could at least prove that the initial Manulife RRSP was QROPS registered at the time of transfer. On the other hand, am I not best just leaving it in the current scheme, even though it is no longer ROPS registered, as at least it once was? I believe the HMRC can hit you with very heavy fines (approx 40% of the fund value) if they think your scheme is not ROPS compliant.

If I just leave it where it is, I'll bleed to death with the high fees though. I'm 38 and my wife is 37. Another 25 years of those high fees would literally cost me thousands and thousands.

Argh!! Any advice please??

Kentonmag

As someone who has had to transfer my Company UK pension into a UK based pension fund because the HMRC booted Canada off the ROPs list, I would say the HMRC have currently washed their hands of how the previously transferred funds are governed in Canada. The reason Canada was kicked off the HMRC ROPs list was because the financial institutions in Canada had abused the rules.
I'd certainly be kicking your IFA into touch, you could approach another financial institution about investing and have them bring the account under their umbrella, which would take it out of the hands of your current useless adviser.