If you are planning to invest in ULIP, at this date ICICI Prudential Ace seems to be the best plan to invest in. You will not see a lot of advertisements of this plan. I guess this would be because this plan will not need a lot of marketing.
Salient features of the scheme:
- 100% premium allocation from the very first year.
- Policy administration charges are fixed and not %age of fund value.
- Option of funds to invest your money in depending on your risk appetite.
- High surrender value. 100% after the first 5 policy years.
- Additional allocation units from the 6th year.
- Loyalty additions every 5 years from the 10th year.
This is probably the first plan which gives a good chance for your investment to grow. There are no fund allocation charges right from the first year (although top-up premium attract a premium allocation charge of 1%). This mean the whole of the money that you pay will be added to your fund value. From the 6th year onwards, fund allocation is 102% (i.e. For every Rs 100 that you pay Rs 102 get allocated to your fund). Although this is not applicable for top-ups.
As is the case with other recently launched ULIP plans, this plan also has a fixed policy administration charges of Rs 60 per month.
The fund offers you a choice of eight different funds. Depending on your risk appetite, you can choose appropriate fund to invest in. Out of choices of fund there is also one fund which guarantees some return. Although before investing in this fund, make sure you have read and understood footnote of page 4 of the product brochure.
In case you do not wish to continue with this ULIP plan after 3 years, you can surrender the policy. If you surrender the policy after 5 year you will get your full fund value. In case you surrender the policy after 3 years, you still get 90% of your fund value, which is quite decent.
Starting from the 10th year, after every 5 years, you also get 2.5% bonus. This bonus is termed as Loyalty additions and should further boost the returns of the plan.
If you have spare money on hand and wish to invest in your existing plan, this plan gives you option of paying top-up premium. Paying top-up premium increases your sum assured. The increase of sum assured will be 125 - 500% of top-up. For example if you pay a top-up of 10,000 your sum assured could increase by 12,500 to 50,000.
Verdict:
First true investment ULIP plan, which does not eat up any of your investment. Very flexible, gives lots of choices to customer.
Problem is the plan has so many choices that it can become difficult for the customer to understand all the available options.
All in all plan looks good.
Brochure of the plan could be found here.
Meta: April 15th, 2010 by
Tags: ICICI · insurance · ULIP · unit linked insurance plan2 Comments
Yes, you are right..I guess this plan is pretty much available online at the ICICI Prudential website. I havent seen any other advertisments for the same either
Commissions are low so no one sells this! When I inquired about this in ICICIDIRECT superstore they had to call some other office to know such a product exists!
How do the funds rank? My take is that the fund performance is very important in the longer run. A 20% return ULIP fund and a 23% return fund for example, will vary so much after few years. I am still researching the fund performance in ACE. Any feedback?