facebookShould I continue or terminate AXA Policy Wealth Accelerate? I am only 11 months into this ILP and already paying $700 per month. This policy is meant to be an investment. Any advice? - Seedly

Jia Cheng Ong

08 Jun 2021

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Insurance

Should I continue or terminate AXA Policy Wealth Accelerate? I am only 11 months into this ILP and already paying $700 per month. This policy is meant to be an investment. Any advice?

I was initially attracted by the high bonus but the platform fee and other fees which came out to around 4.5% annually are making me doubt my decision. This policy is meant to be an investment.

I already have a hospitalization plan and term life insurance.

Discussion (4)

What are your thoughts?

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Hi Jia Cheng,

I work in a company with access to 17 insurance companies as well as iFast and Navigator. Still, I chose to also invest in AXA's plan myself As part of my wealth accumulation portfolio.

All my client on AXA's Wealth Treasure and Wealth Accelerate are very happy with their returns (net fees). In case random people come and argue, the mentioned returns is based on every dollar invested; I took bonus as capital invested Not as returns.

Also, such plans surely has slightly higher fees in the early years because they are NOT meant for short term investments. (I always make sure this is Highlighted to my clients to prevent mismatch of expectations. Are you also using this as long term investment and using only partial of your current cash flow?) In the long run, the returns to break even fees are very much lower than if you do it on other platforms with upfront sales charges and regular maintenance fees.

Next, please don't be misguided by comments talking about mixing insurance with investment. They are talking about traditional ILP that allows insurance premiums to eat into your investments. Yes, this plan does has a death benefit of 15% on Net Asset Value, but does it have insurance charges ? NO. Does 100% of your premiums gets invested ? YES.

To conclude, usually people are okay with slightly higher fees IF they can get greater returns with zero self management. If you're not happy with your returns, maybe you need to switch to better funds out of the whole list provided and update your investment strategy with your advisor. And if you don't understand how the fees work for you, you need to speak to your advisor again or even other advisors that can assist to explain it clearer for you so that you can make an informed decision becos you're looking at is a $7700 Premiums loss... If after a review you still find it uncomfortable to continue, then you need to quickly find other solutions to do wealth accumulation.

I know it may be stressful and maybe complicated and tough, but i do hope you achieve a decision you are comfortable and happy with soon! πŸ€—

I strongly disagree that all ILPs are simply terrible products without focusing some of the merits and flexibility that they provide which CANNOT be replicated by term and whole life insurance.

The benefit of such a policy usually employs having a platform whereby if you do frequent trading, such platforms give you unlimited switching options, which will tend to be better priced than what you can get at your standard brokerages.

If however, your strategy was to simply buy through dollar-cost averaging without doing any adjustments, and you could not care less about trading. Than neither a brokerage house nor an insurer is the ideal platform. Because their fees are high. The best option would be to use a platform like Stashaway instead. You can dollar cost average at 0.8% for one dollar a day with their platform.

Basically, simply expect any structure provided to you with a fixed commitment with no flexibility of next day withdrawal to have very high distribution costs. This applies to ALL products in the market.

Elijah Lee

22 Mar 2020

Senior Financial Services Manager at Phillip Securities (Jurong East)

Hi Jia Cheng,

My stand is simple: I don't recommend mixing investments with insurance. Investments ...

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