Moving existing plans to Cavendish Online to reduce the charges

Cavendish Online is the only "nil-commission" discount broker in the UK. We give back all of the commission wherever possible.

This means that you can benefit by changing or moving existing plans, including pensions, from your current adviser (or direct with the insurance company) to Cavendish Online. There are two ways that you can utilise this process, the first applies to Term Assurance and pensions. In this case the policy must be re-written via Cavendish Online so that it is on nil-commission terms from the outset. Your term assurance premium will reduce, usually by 20-30%. You can do a quotation in the life assurance section of the site. You should NOT cancel your existing plan until the one via Cavendish has commenced.

For pensions you will need to start a new plan via Cavendish Online and transfer your existing scheme into it. The benefit is that the annual management charge will reduce by upto 0.4% for the whole term of the plan.

The second process applies to ISA, Pep and OEIC investments and the benefit is that the renewal commission can be returned to you. Further information can be found in the fund supermarket section of the site.

An example of this is shown in Martin Lewis's article for Moneywise Magazine. In summary he used a stakeholder pension contribution of £200.00 per month for 25 years, which, under "normal" (full) commission, assuming 7% per annum growth would achieve a fund of £181,000. If after three years this plan was transferred to Cavendish Online, and our nil-commission terms, the value after 25 years (22 under Cavendish Online) would be £188,200. Had the customer used Cavendish Online from the start, the plan would be worth £190,000.

To proceed, you must complete our change of agency (pdf) form (or HTML) and send it to Cavendish Online along with our client declaration and fee of £25.00 for each plan. We will then forward this to the company concerned and arrange for the scheme to be set up on nil commission terms. This will often involve your completing a new application and receiving a new policy number, which we will send to you if necessary.

For tax reasons we cannot give back commission on pensions as cash in the way that we can for ISAs and Peps. If the commission cannot be reinvested then we cannot help you. It may be worth setting up a new plan altogether, as the charges on newer schemes are much lower than five years ago.