Royal Life / Sun Alliance Endowment Shortfall - Keep or Sell ?

EdInvestor

Bargain addict

They bought Scottish Life, would that be it?

Post some figs and we can take a look:

Guaranteed sum assured
Declared bonuses
Surrender value (ring up and ask)
Monthly premium
Maturity date

dunstonh

RL closed their own doors for new business but they did buy Scottish Life, as Ed says. Scottish Life are very good pensions provider with good products, funds and service. Royal London themselves are bloody awful on all those counts.

EdInvestor

dunstonh wrote:

RL closed their own doors for new business but they did buy Scottish Life, as Ed says.

Not quite sure what you mean by this DH

Are you saying the RL WP fund is closed to new business?

Or are you saying that RL no longer does direct sales but instead markets its products using the ScotLife brand?

http://www.royallondongroup.com/info/ppfm.htm

Looks like the RL fund is still open to me - the ScotLife fund is closed to new business, of course. I note there is a WP bond on sale - does it have a high minimum investment?

sgn_2

Edinvestor,

I took sometime to reply to your request for further information regarding surrending my endowments. I've now replied under the 'Surrendering Endowments' thread. Can you take a look, please :A

bargainaddict

I have just done the same too. Thank you

dunstonh

EdInvestor wrote:

Not quite sure what you mean by this DH

Are you saying the RL WP fund is closed to new business?

Or are you saying that RL no longer does direct sales but instead markets its products using the ScotLife brand?

http://www.royallondongroup.com/info/ppfm.htm

Looks like the RL fund is still open to me - the ScotLife fund is closed to new business, of course. I note there is a WP bond on sale - does it have a high minimum investment?

Royal London no longer have a salesforce and there are no Royal London branded products available to IFAs. They use Scottish Life for pensions and investments and Bright Grey for protection.

AFAIA, the Royal London brand markets no regulated financial services. Therefore, making the RL with profits fund effectively closed for new business. That being said the Scottish Life WP fund appears to be contained within the Royal London fund as a sub fund (as often happens with life companies). To be honest, I took a quick look on the scot life site and thats what it suggests. However, i havent investigated any further as there is no chance of me ever using that fund.

Kellm9

EdInvestor wrote:

Hi kellm9

Your situation is much the same as that of the OP. If you surrendered policy 1 and put it in the bank @4%, also paying in the premiums until maturity, you would end up with 14,399, compared with your guaranteed value of 11,897, which is unlikely to increase or to be topped up by any terminal bonus.

Ditto for policy 2, you would receive 25,192, compared with a guaranteed value of 22,554.

Unless you would need to replace the life cover at great expense, the way forward looks clear, see above.

Note that if your mortgage interest rate is higher than 4% you would receive a higher return by using the money to reduce the size of the mortgage owed.

I have been thinking of surrendering since my earlier post on page 1. I have been spurred again by Phoenix letter re transfer of some of it's with profits to another company.

So I called again for transfer value and how to surrender. To my surprise the surrender values have risen substantially from,

Policy 1/ Surrender Value as of 18/11/05 £10252 and as of 5/4/06 £11865 &
Policy 2/ Surrender Value as of 18/11/05 £16,831 and as of 5/4/06 £19562.

What I don't understand is if I had surrendered in November and invested I would not have made anything like as much as these have grown. Also policy 1 is already worth its guaranteed value of 11,897 and has a few years to go. At the current returns I would tend to stay put with the policies. Am I missing something, it seemed quite cut and dry to me in November.

Any comments greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Kellm9

zzzLazyDaisy

I have a Royal Life / Pheonix policy that I gave up on and made 'paid up' last year (wish I'd surrendered it and took the cash now).

It has 5 years to run. Is there anything I can do, or should I just leave it and wait?

Thanks for your comments

Daisy

ScoobyZ

Mine jumped up just after the new year. Have also cashed it in.

My buy-to-let made more in first year than policy made in 15 years.

EdInvestor

Hi Kellm

Have you got these figures in writing?