Is Manulife's InvestReadyWealth (II) worth it?

Don't need to rush into any investment product just yet. Take a couple of months to read up as much as you can.

The last thing you want is to be committed to a subpar investment product where you are paying an outrageous fee for.

Books from John Bogle and Ben Graham has helped me alot.

I am probably bias after my previous stint in a financial institution but the main purpose of an investment product is to provide revenue for the company and its agent/portfolio managers. As you said, these are projected (not guaranteed) returns so do you have a bail-out option (which is probably impossible or comes with a high loss) like decent surrender value if these returns are much lower / ended up in losses instead? I rather go for robo-advisors or even the not-so-good STI ETF to kick-start the investment journey . When you have income, go for global index funds like IWDA/VWRA. I am okay with third party managing my risk (insurance) but as for my money, I think I rather leave on my own hands and I am just doing boring IWDA / EIMi DCA every month.