Should I stay in the default fund or choose my own funds?

As well as making sure you are saving enough, it’s important to consider where your pension savings are invested. With TPT, you can let us take care of this for you or take a more hands-on approach and choose where to invest your pension contributions. But how do you decide which approach is right for you?

TPT's default target date funds

When you’re first enrolled with TPT, your pension pot is automatically invested in one of our ‘default investment options’. This could be in one of our target date funds (‘TDFs’ for short) or our Ethical Target Date Fund.

The target date fund you’ll be automatically invested in is determined by the age that you plan to retire – your ‘target retirement age’. When you’re first enrolled with TPT, your target retirement age is automatically set at age 65 but you can change this at any time in your online account.

Each target date fund then invests in a range of assets such as company shares, bonds and property. The investments held by our funds must also meet our responsible investment criteria and align with our climate action plan and decarbonisation targets.

In the earlier stages of your pension savings journey, your money is invested in higher risk assets, to give it the opportunity to grow. As you get nearer to your target retirement age, your money is moved into more cautious assets whose value  are less likely to fluctuate.  These changes are made in order to protect the value of your pension pot from any sudden falls in the stock market in the run up to your target retirement age’.

The aim of our target date funds is to provide long-term returns that are better than the rate of inflation, so that your pension savings grow in real terms, while avoiding high levels of risk as you approach retirement. 

Because of how target date funds work, it’s important to keep your target retirement age up to date. If you are planning to retire earlier or later than age 65, please let us know. You can easily check and update your target retirement age in your online account. Other than that, they’re designed to be hands-off - so you don’t need to worry about anything.

Choosing your own investment funds

If you want to become more actively involved in how your pension savings are invested, or you have particular religious or ethical beliefs that might impact how you invest, you can choose from our range of self-select funds.

TPT’s self-select funds enable you take control over where your pension contributions are invested. You could choose to invest in things like property, infrastructure, or socially responsible investment strategies, such as low carbon transition and positive impact investing. You can choose to focus on UK-specific funds, or the global market. And if you are Muslim, you can choose to invest in our Islamic Global Equity Fund, which meets Islamic finance investment principles and complies with Sharia law. You’re not limited to just one fund either. Our self-select options allow you place a proportion of your investment into multiple funds so if several funds interest you, you are free to invest some of your money in each of them.

If you decide to choose your own investments, please be aware that you’re responsible for making all fund changes in the future and making sure your selected funds have an appropriate level of risk for your needs. You will also need to monitor how the funds perform and ensure they remain aligned with your overall retirement plans. With our self-select range there is no automatic switching into lower-risk investments as you approach your target retirement age. This means you would need to actively update your fund choices to switch your money into lower-risk options.

If you’d like to review your investments or make changes to the funds your TPT pension savings are invested in, you can do this through your online retirement savings account.

What’s right for you?

At the end of the day, you need to weigh up what’s right for you. Our range of select-selects funds are designed to empower you to make choices about how you invest your money, and to make this as straightforward as possible. Of course this approach isn’t going to be for everyone and if you don’t feel confident making your own investment decisions, you can leave this to TPT to manage for you – something many of our members do. And remember, you can change your mind at any time, so if you want to get more hands-on and manage your investments or put your investments back in the hands of TPT, you’re free to do so at any time.

If you’d like to find out more about our range of self-select funds, simply click here.

IMPORTANT - Upcoming pause to changing investment funds

We’re launching some new services next year, which will make it even easier to manage your defined contribution (DC) pension savings with TPT and prepare for your financial future.

While we prepare these new services your employer will continue to collect and pay your pension contributions to us in the usual way, but we won’t be able to carry out some key transactions on your pension account, including changing investment funds.

If you are planning to change your investment funds, we must receive your request by 26 January 2025, otherwise we will be unable to complete your transfer until May 2025, when our new services launch.