Which insurance companies have been performing for their par funds?? Am considering an endowment plan!

Please do not get an endowment plan. I was in your situation. Last year, when I hit 18, I immediately purchased an endowment plan without knowing much. Later on after reading up, I realized how much fees I was paying, and how much opportunity cost I lost by buying that endowment.

So this year I recently terminated the plan at a 100% loss, knowing that the 2k+ I was going to put into the endowment yearly could be used to attain a potentially higher compounded yield with ETFs and stockpicking. If DIY investing is not your thing, then maybe consider a Roboadvisor such as Syfe.

As always, DYODD and I wish you the very best of luck.

Hi Anon,

There is more to just the performance of insurers' par funds to consider when determining which endowments to go for. I did a webinar recently discussing the role of participating insurance in our financial plans.

A more accurate measure would be to calculate the IRR of the endowments based on guaranteed and non guaranteed returns. (from 30:25 of webinar)

Here's a quick glance at the returns of various insurers' par fund over the last 5 years (some have not published their 2020 returns hence the table is until 2019)

There's more to what the policyholder gets back in terms of the total returns on your policy and the par fund returns do not directly translate to how good their endowments will be.

With a time horizon of 15-20 years I'm assuming you are still young and definitely have the bandwidth to explore alternatives to endowments which are lower cost and more flexible. (I had a discussion on using endowments for accumulation from 1:03:46).

Hope this helps!​​​