Pensions and high net worth vs sophisticated investor

A question about : Pensions and high net worth vs sophisticated investor

I see that the FCA's high net worth investor requirements exclude for the Ј250k qualification:

any benefits (in the form of pensions or otherwise) which are payable on the termination of my service or on my death or retirement and to which I am (or my dependants are), or may be, entitled.

So, what about pensions that are payable before retirement, such as personal pensions payable on demand from age 55 whether retiring or not?

It's interesting because I may now qualify as a sophisticated investor due to P2P investing in unlisted businesses and wonder if I might also qualify as a high net worth investor, which would be possible only if some pension assets were included.

I also wonder what the effect of my plan to move investment money from outside a pension into a pension would have on the potential to qualify as HNW until I actually take money from a pension in a few years. Once I reach 55 and do that I'd quite rapidly pass the current HNW net assets minimum.

Most of the investments that are available under these certifications aren't interesting to me - and shouldn't be at my income/assets level! - but it's good to know what options I have or will have and when.

Best answers:

• If you can qualify as certified (by someone else) or self certified sophisticated investor that might be the easiest. That or the 'income' test would be how I would qualify so haven't looked at the asset test side in any great detail.
  Someone who is stinking rich and has more money than sense does not need to be protected from themselves so if you can't qualify as sophisticated you can qualify by being happily able to absorb the loss - the HNW route.
  In the absence of guidance from the financial service business from whom you want to get access to a specific product... one would assume the benefits you have coming to you for potential end of service, death or retirement are excluded from the FCA definitions for the reason that you don't in practice have access to them until some point later, contingent on you retiring or leaving work, and implicitly giving up your employment income, so those benefits don't really add to your 'worth' here and now for the purposes of being able to go into a risky investment and simply write it off.
  If you *do* have access to all your benefits because you *don't* have to wait to retire or for some future event (because for example, the turning age 55 thing has already given you free access to the store of value), then you are right that you should be able to count those assets.
  Just my opinion but I think if you voluntarily dump money into a pension plan which you can't access (whether the prohibition on access is because of not reaching an age trigger point or not being retired or dead yet) then that is something that seems, in spirit at least, to not be a qualifying asset similar to if the money had been in that asset all along and expected to be drawn only from retirement onwards.
  So it sounds like you might have a situation where you take yourself out of the HNW bracket by going for a pension lockup to get the tax benefits. It is of course a self certification process (albeit the provider should take steps to see whether it's completely fabricated) and therefore a quiet word with the person selling the product may elicit the result you want. They would just have to be happy with it, knowing what they then know about where your worth really is.