Phoenix Life - a bit rubbish

[Gio G]

So Phoenix Life has taken over my old NPI pensions. Most of my pension pots are easily accessible through some sort of online portal, Aviva, AEGON and Scot Windows etc. However went to try and register the Phoenix Life portal and appears you have to be over 55 to access it....!!

So I assume the only way I get to know it's performance is through ringing them every month, or wait for my yearly statement. Anyone have any dealings with this company? Sort of thinking they should be the first on my transfer out and consolidation list! Speaking with their customer services, pretty unhelpful..

G

[Blatter]

Don't you get an annual statement from Phoenix Life?

I've got a SERP which I originally took out with NPI back in about 1985 and I get annual statements from Phoenix Life.

Never bothered trying to access them on-line.

[Gio G]

Blatter said:

Don't you get an annual statement from Phoenix Life?

I've got a SERP which I originally took out with NPI back in about 1985 and I get annual statements from Phoenix Life.

Never bothered trying to access them on-line.

Yes, I get yearly statements, but most providers provide online access these days. Google searched them for reviews, seems to be lots of horror stories associated with them..

G

[mike9009]

I took an endowment in 1997 with Royal and Sun Alliance. This got transferred to Phoenix a few years back. Frankly the performance (only calculated through annual statements a few years back at about 2% PA) is rubbish and on line service appalling. All I get from them is red alert letters annually. 'Probably' the worst investment choice I have made! (I was young and stupid!!) now just old and stupid!! Admittedly I do get life cover with it too

Naively I have kept paying in and just waiting for the pay-out in 4 years. I now have other investment vehicles which will cover the shortfall.


Mike

[sidicks]

mike9009 said:

I took an endowment in 1997 with Royal and Sun Alliance. This got transferred to Phoenix a few years back. Frankly the performance (only calculated through annual statements a few years back at about 2% PA) is rubbish and on line service appalling. All I get from them is red alert letters annually. 'Probably' the worst investment choice I have made! (I was young and stupid!!) now just old and stupid!! Admittedly I do get life cover with it too

Naively I have kept paying in and just waiting for the pay-out in 4 years. I now have other investment vehicles which will cover the shortfall.

Mike

What was the return achieved once you’ve adjusted for the life insurance element?

Presumably this is a with-profit policy? In which case there could be a substantial terminal bonus at maturity.

Edited by sidicks on Friday 30th March 16:10

[mike9009]

sidicks said:

mike9009 said:

I took an endowment in 1997 with Royal and Sun Alliance. This got transferred to Phoenix a few years back. Frankly the performance (only calculated through annual statements a few years back at about 2% PA) is rubbish and on line service appalling. All I get from them is red alert letters annually. 'Probably' the worst investment choice I have made! (I was young and stupid!!) now just old and stupid!! Admittedly I do get life cover with it too

Naively I have kept paying in and just waiting for the pay-out in 4 years. I now have other investment vehicles which will cover the shortfall.

Mike

What was the return achieved once you’ve adjusted for the life insurance element?

Presumably this is a with-profit policy? In which case there could be a substantial terminal bonus at maturity.

Edited by sidicks on Friday 30th March 16:10

Hi Sidicks

I am not sure how much the life insurance and initial fees have taken out of the investment and I appreciate there is 'maybe' a maturity bonus. I have not investigated too heavily (as you probably appreciate ) What is the typical maturity bonus for these schemes or is it written somewhere?? All I know is that other investments I have over similar timescales (including fees) have out-performed by 3 fold over similar time periods......

This is one investment I have just written off to achieve anything like it was initially projected to achieve. Probably a 25% short fall at maturity compared to the original projections (....PS I don't blame anyone but myself for this naïve investment, by the way...... ) My excuse is the internet was not really that helpful back then.....

Mike

[sidicks]

mike9009 said:

Hi Sidicks

I am not sure how much the life insurance and initial fees have taken out of the investment and I appreciate there is 'maybe' a maturity bonus. I have not investigated too heavily (as you probably appreciate ) What is the typical maturity bonus for these schemes or is it written somewhere?? All I know is that other investments I have over similar timescales (including fees) have out-performed by 3 fold over similar time periods......

But the other investments didn’t have attaching life insurance, so it’s not a fair comparison.

mike9009 said:

This is one investment I have just written off to achieve anything like it was initially projected to achieve. Probably a 25% short fall at maturity compared to the original projections (....PS I don't blame anyone but myself for this naïve investment, by the way...... ) My excuse is the internet was not really that helpful back then.....

Mike

Unfortunately, the investment environment when the projections were made and the investment environment actually experienced were two different things - that’s not the fault of the provider or you, as investor.

Edited by sidicks on Friday 30th March 21:10

[Jockman]

Generally a very expensive way of gaining Life Assurance, bearing in mind current rates.

I had experience with Phoenix Life many years ago and they were fine. A sort of 'mop up' company for unloved endowment policies.

Terminal Bonuses can account for a large part of the final pot but if IIRC even those rates were subject to annual adjustments.

[sidicks]

Jockman said:

Generally a very expensive way of gaining Life Assurance, bearing in mind current rates.

I had experience with Phoenix Life many years ago and they were fine. A sort of 'mop up' company for unloved endowment policies.

Terminal Bonuses can account for a large part of the final pot but if IIRC even those rates were subject to annual adjustments.

Terminal bonus reflects actual investment performance (after allowing for some smoothing) over the term of the contract, so is (necessarily) variable and updated each year.

Edited by sidicks on Friday 30th March 21:50

[Jockman]

sidicks said:

Terminal bonus reflects actual invest performance over the term of the contract, so is (necessarily) variable and updated each year.

Makes sense.

[V8 Fettler]

Is this the same Phoenix Life that become a dumping ground for unloved "zombie" endowment policies? Buy an endowment policy from a well known and respected investment organisation, who then dump the policy at a later date.

[sidicks]

V8 Fettler said:

Is this the same Phoenix Life that become a dumping ground for unloved "zombie" endowment policies? Buy an endowment policy from a well known and respected investment organisation, who then dump the policy at a later date.

The institutions selling the liabilities were often ones that had closed to new business and fixed costs would eventually have adversely impacted returns.

What do you mean ‘dump’ the policy?

Edited by sidicks on Saturday 31st March 10:14

[snabzter]

V8 Fettler said:

Is this the same Phoenix Life that become a dumping ground for unloved "zombie" endowment policies? Buy an endowment policy from a well known and respected investment organisation, who then dump the policy at a later date.

Phoenix Life are not a dumping ground for closed funds. They takeover closed funds when other firms either no longer see them as a core part of their business or if the expenses of running the fund become too high that it becomes detrimental to the policy holders. If expenses are too high then it reduces the potential payout of with-profits policies. Phoenix Life takeover closed funds and as they can get economies of scale in running them it means lower expenses. This in turn means potentially higher payouts to with-profits policyholders, but this also depends on investment returns. Companies like Phoenix Life taking over closed funds can be very beneficial to with-profits policyholders.

[sidicks]

snabzter said:

Phoenix Life are not a dumping ground for closed funds. They takeover closed funds when other firms either no longer see them as a core part of their business or if the expenses of running the fund become too high that it becomes detrimental to the policy holders. If expenses are too high then it reduces the potential payout of with-profits policies. Phoenix Life takeover closed funds and as they can get economies of scale in running them it means lower expenses. This in turn means potentially higher payouts to with-profits policyholders, but this also depends on investment returns. Companies like Phoenix Life taking over closed funds can be very beneficial to with-profits policyholders.

Indeed. Unfortunately V8Fettler is long on rhetoric and short on knowledge in this area.

[drainbrain]

V8 Fettler said:

Is this the same Phoenix Life that become a dumping ground for unloved "zombie" endowment policies? Buy an endowment policy from a well known and respected investment organisation, who then dump the policy at a later date.

They seem to have taken over a whole of life policy I bought in 1989 from a con-man mob who have subsequently gone down the plug 'ole.

This marvellous p.o.s. was supposed to have a 'guaranteed' death benefit of £40k and gather some value over the years at the same time.

Fat chance any of that was ever going to happen.

Somehow the "guaranteed" death benefit has become £12583 (lol) and after 29 years has accrued a value of £340!!

It seems that the way the ridiculous nonsense works is that the longer you live, the more the death benefit reduces and the lower any "value" in the thing becomes. And I imagine that somewhere deep in the voluminous small print of this financial garbage there's a clause that excludes 'death' from triggering a payout, or reduces the "guaranteed" payout to zero should that event occur.

But yet, at least Phoenix have kept this zombie alive which wouldn't have been the case if it was still in the hands of the original tricksters.

And it's also funny in the "another fine mess, Ollie" way (which is why I keep paying the premiums)!!

[sidicks]

drainbrain said:

They seem to have taken over a whole of life policy I bought in 1989 from a con-man mob who have subsequently gone down the plug 'ole.

This marvellous p.o.s. was supposed to have a 'guaranteed' death benefit of £40k and gather some value over the years at the same time.

Fat chance any of that was ever going to happen.

Somehow the "guaranteed" death benefit has become £12583 (lol) and after 29 years has accrued a value of £340!!

It seems that the way the ridiculous nonsense works is that the longer you live, the more the death benefit reduces and the lower any "value" in the thing becomes. And I imagine that somewhere deep in the voluminous small print of this financial garbage there's a clause that excludes 'death' from triggering a payout, or reduces the "guaranteed" payout to zero should that event occur.

But yet, at least Phoenix have kept this zombie alive which wouldn't have been the case if it was still in the hands of the original tricksters.

And it's also funny in the "another fine mess, Ollie" way (which is why I keep paying the premiums)!!

Phoenix can’t change the terms of the original investment, so it appears you didn’t understand what you bought.

It also appears that ‘what you imagine’ and ‘what is reality’ are two very different things.

[croyde]

This has made me think back to 1988 and my first mortgage sold to me by some shyster and signing up to a pension from another one.

The pension was moved around. I remember Old Mutual at one point and now it sits with Phoenix Life.

Payments have always been 130 pounds a month and I never increased it due to lack of funds plus the firm belief that if I ever get to pensionable age, the money would have gone to fund the chairman's new boat.

So the fund as of last April was sitting at 120k.

Is that bad for a total of 30k odd put in over a 30 year period?

[sidicks]

croyde said:

This has made me think back to 1988 and my first mortgage sold to me by some shyster and signing up to a pension from another one.

The pension was moved around. I remember Old Mutual at one point and now it sits with Phoenix Life.

Payments have always been 130 pounds a month and I never increased it due to lack of funds plus the firm belief that if I ever get to pensionable age, the money would have gone to fund the chairman's new boat.

So the fund as of last April was sitting at 120k.

Is that bad for a total of 30k odd put in over a 30 year period?

Eh?

For some reason you thought that the money that you would be paying in wouldn’t actually be added to your policy (despite the security around pension fund investments), yet continued to pay £130per month to the same company?

Hmm..

[croyde]

Yeah I know

I'm a numpty

[drainbrain]

croyde said:

Yeah I know

I'm a numpty

Hahaha!! Not half as numptyish as buying a whole-of-life policy whose death benefit and value decrease as you get older which very possibly has a clause in it saying it "guarantees" to pay you jack squat if you die!

The Phoenix Life people must have a right laugh about us numpties who are daft enough to shovel cash at them every month for all this nonsense!

More seriously, if you've paid 130 a month in for 30 years you've paid in closer to £46k than £30k. And you say you've got a fund worth £120k? That's more than good, mate, that's a bloody MIRACLE!

To give you an idea, I shovelled about £25k into a couple of pensions over about 15 years. The "fund" by that time had "grown" into £25k!!

Obviously there's some mistake with yours. Such gains aren't allowed. Probably aren't even LEGAL!

You sure it's not one of these Sid annuity things you're paying into where they take all your pot, pay you an annual pittance then steal the lot when you croak? (aka The Chairman's Boat fund)

Edited by drainbrain on Saturday 31st March 13:51