Were You Mis-sold Investments in Storage Pods?

With the numbers of mis-sold pension claims growing every year it is now estimated that as many as 1 in 3 pensions were mis-sold through bad advice and poor investments. Investors were pushed towards high risk, non-standard investments by advisors who were at best incompetent and at worse unscrupulous. One of the most common scenarios coming up in compensation claims was when investors were advised to take their secure pension savings and move them into SiPP’s which invested in high-risk products, promising exceptionally good returns. These inevitably failed and left people with huge losses from their retirement funds. Thankfully, anyone who has been through this scenario is now eligible for compensation

One such high risk SiPP investment was in storage pods. Many financial advisors were pushing this type of investment, promising those high returns but it was totally inappropriate for retirement investment as it came with a lot more risk than investors were led to believe. Storage Pod investment involved clients buying long leases to storage pods on the understanding that these storage pods would be let out by the managing company and the clients would receive rental income. However, numerous storage pods ended up sitting empty for long periods and were not producing any income at all. Despite the lack of income, the management company continued to take fees for management out of the SiPP and consequently the pension funds went down instead of up! The client’s pension was thus the owner of something which they could not let out and which wasn’t really an asset they could sell, meaning it had little value.

Storage pods rarely, if ever, made money and were a terrible idea for pension funds. Some of the worst storage pod investment schemes were outright scams and anyone caught up in them lost their entire life savings. Thankfully however, compensation is now available to anyone caught up in these schemes / scams.