Any thoughts on Tokio Marine Go Treasures? Looking at retirement/ child education planning.

Hi anon,

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TM Go Treasures is an ILP.

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Personally, if I was looking at retirement, investments would be an option, and I would want to look at income producing assets, such as unit trusts or shares. However, it does not mean that I would use an ILP to get accecs to such asset classes. So for the intent of retirement, I'd definitely be looking at investing my monies, but that will be directly via an online platform or through advisor means, whereby I am not locked into my monies, and I have flexibility to start, top up, pause, stop and withdraw as and when needed.

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The main issues (non-exhaustive) with investment based ILP tend to stem from high surrender penalties, a boat load of charges at the policy level, over and above those at the fund level, which really degrade performance, even when you factor 'bonus' allocations. Possibly the only good point is the chance to access funds that may not be available to the retail investor, but then the advisor has to be very good at picking these funds, and also managing the risk that comes with them.

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On the topic of child education planning, I would suggest that you consider something safe (i.e. with a guarantee at a minimum). You won't want your child to have to delay or defer further education because a market crash depleted the value of the portfolio by 30%-50%. Since education is pretty much a time bound commitment (you will roughly know when your child goes to university), such commitments should be met with something that has an element of safety.

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Retirement, on the other hand, is something that is somewhat flexible and few people know for sure when they will truly retire. Some flexibility in planning for retirement is to be expected, and this is where investments can play a part as you will usually have some time (we're talking about years) to ride out any market volatility. Of course, some stability is needed in retirement too, and that is where CPF LIFE supplemented by annuities can provide a reasonable amount of predictable income, with the rest of your income provided via income producing investments.

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So in summary, I personally would not use TM Go Treasures for retirement purposes, much less child education.

A quick google suggests this is an ILP. without knowing the details of the plan, generally, I would avoid ILP. my take is never mix investment with insurance. There are probably better options from robos or from regular brokers for investments at lower fees and more flexibility.

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but endowments and annunities from insurers are ok, but they have lower returns.

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i think you may like start first to consider how much you need for your child education / your retirement then see which type of investments are more suitable for you.

eg, need $1mil and already have $500k. need to grow 500k to 1mil in 20yrs. simple calculation would bring the desired rate of return to be slightly less than 4%. in this case you probably need only a portfolio of CPF + endowment + bonds. no point chasing return in case there is prolong recession then cannot meet the returns when the time comes for your own retirement.

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hope this helps.