Surrender or sell my endowment

Fiorella

Just wondering If I would get more money selling my endowment rather than surrendering it. Anybody any Ideas???

EdInvestor

What company is it with? Is it in With profits?

Fiorella

Its with profits and is with friends provident

ReportInvestor

I'm afraid that the Friends Provident WP endowment investment performance has not good & they are currently at or near the bottom when it comes to payouts.

Assuming this means that terminal bonuses are either not strong or set to disappear, I can't imagine that there is much of a TEP market for their policies.

But I'd love to be proved wrong.

Has anyone tried to sell a FP WP endowment recently?

Gogetitgirl_2

Hi - I have a friend who has recently sold her policy to a company called AAP. Their website is https://www.aap.co.uk - they may be able to help you. She got more money from them than by surrendering her policy to the life office.

ReportInvestor

Hi Ggg and welcome to the site .

Can you say if it was that a Friends Provident endowment your friend sold?

sleeping_giant

I'm in the process of selling two Friends Provident endowment policies. If you want to compare the details of my policies with yours, I posted them in this thread.

I contacted half a dozen companies about my two policies. None was interested in the smaller policy (#2), which I decided to surrender to Friends Provident. To their credit, Friends Provident handled this process very quickly and efficiently, and the money was deposited in my bank account within a week of my contacting them.

Several companies declined to make an offer for policy #1, too, but I did receive some reasonable offers from the others -- although nothing like the 20-30% above the surrender value that is sometimes touted on TEP marketers' websites. Anyway, I received firm, direct offers to buy my policy that ranged from £400 to £1100 above the surrender value, and non-direct purchase offers that were as much as £2500 above the surrender value. As I understand it, the difference between the two types of offer is that in the first case the company with which you're dealing buys the policy from you, whereas in the second case the company acts as a middleman and undertakes to market the policy to potential buyers. In the end, I decided to accept the best of the firm offers.

The speed with which you want to sell your policy may determine which type of offer you accept, together with your attitude to risk. Several companies that I contacted stated that it would take 3-4 weeks to process a firm offer and 3-4 months to process a non-direct one. The best non-direct offer came from a company that, after a little digging around on this site and the Motley Fool site, I found to have a rather chequered history: making generous offers for endowments, signing up the policy owners, but then failing to secure a buyer in a reasonable amount of time. In some cases, after waiting more than six months for their policies to be sold, the policy owners had had to buy their way out of the contracts they'd signed.

If you inform Friends Provident that you're thinking of selling your policy, they'll send you a short list of companies that may be interested in buying it. Or you could try the companies listed on this page:

http://www.apmm.org/member_list.asp

For what it's worth, I chose to go with Surrenda-Link (http://www.surrendalink.co.uk).

For the fairly small amount of effort that is required, I think it's well worth getting quotations from a few of these companies. If this only serves to confirm that you can't improve on the surrender value of your policy then, when you do surrender it to Friends Provident, at least you can do so in the knowledge that you haven't missed out on a few extra quid!

Pete

DavidEdinburgh_2

I've been considering the same options sell/surrender so this is all useful.
Do you need to notify lender if you sell the endowment - anyone know the process?
Lender is Alliance & Leicester. Endowment is Friends Provident.
I dont want to incur fees for restructuring my mortgage. Just want to overpay
each month instead.

Thanks,
David.

EdInvestor

Do you need to notify lender if you sell the endowment - anyone know the process?

It depends. If your mortgage is an old one, your endowment might be "assigned" to the lender - and you would then need to get the lender to release it, otherwise the lifeco won't pay out the surrender proceeds.

If the mortgage is a comparatively recent one, then the policy is very unlikely to be assigned, and you can just go ahead and surrender it, the lender won't know or care.