What should you do with a life insurance 3a?

Life Insurance 3a

We have already established that life insurance 3a has significant disadvantages:

• Their returns are low.
• Their fees are high.
• They are very inflexible for deposits, locking you into this monthly expense.
• They are very inflexible for withdrawals, making you lose money in taxes.
• They are not transparent.
• They are heavily advertised.

The only advantage they have over an invested 3a (like finpension 3a) is that they have a guaranteed amount of money. However, life insurance 3a only guarantees a 0% interest rate, and the guaranteed amount is less than what you paid. If you want guaranteed 3a, you should take a bank 3a.

Life insurance 3a also has insurance in case of disability and death. This extra insurance may sound like a significant advantage. However, most people will not need insurance. On top of that, you can get pure risk life insurance for a fraction of the fees of life insurance 3a.

If you need more convincing, I have an entire article explaining why nobody should fall into the trap of life insurance 3a.

What to do with existing life insurance 3a?

It is essential to know that life insurance 3a is a terrible instrument. But what should you do if you already have one?

First, you should not feel bad about it. Many people in Switzerland are falling for life insurance 3a. I have a life insurance 3a. I am not proud of it, but I consider it a learning opportunity.

Why did I take life insurance 3a? An insurance advisor convinced me, and I did not know any better. Most people in Switzerland do not have the necessary financial education to understand how bad these products are. And most people in Switzerland trust advisors, banks, and insurance companies.

Banks, advisors, and insurance companies push these products because life insurance 3a is very lucrative. But life insurance 3a is not lucrative for its users.

We now go to the main question: What should we do with life insurance 3a?

There are three main ways to deal with life insurance 3a:

1. Do nothing
2. Reduce or stop the payments
3. Cease the contract

We will see these three ways in detail in this article.

1. Do nothing

The first and simplest option is to do nothing. You continue contributing your monthly premiums, which stay in your life insurance 3a until your retirement age.

While this option is the simplest, it is also the most costly. Indeed, we have seen that life insurance 3a has abysmal returns and is very expensive. These low returns and high fees result in low performance for life insurance 3a in the long term.

In the previous article, I ran a comparison and got these results after 30 years:

We can see that doing nothing can be extremely costly. Over 30 years, investing in a good 3a could easily yield twice more money by the time you retire.

Overall, I would strongly advise against doing nothing!

2. Release the premiums

The second option is to stop paying the premiums either fully or partially. Most life insurance 3a allows you to be released from the premiums. Once you release the premiums, you will not have to contribute anymore, and the money will stay with the life insurance until the original policy termination date.

From what I know, all life insurance 3a include such a clause in their conditions. So, it is generally not a huge deal to do that.

Here is what would happen to the money by stopping paying the premiums, simulated for 30 years.

We can see that the earlier we stop, the better results we get. It is logical since we get better compounding in the invested 3a, with much better returns. The part invested in the life insurance 3a will continue growing slowly over the years, but you could see it as bonds in your portfolio since this money (minus the fees) is guaranteed.

If you stop the premiums very early, in the first few years of the life insurance 3a, you may incur a penalty. Indeed, in the first few years, the life insurance company takes more in premiums for the risk premiums than in the following years. However, the earlier you stop, the better you will end up in retirement.

This strategy always makes sense unless you are extremely close to retirement. Even a few years without fees could help.

You must remember that the stock market returns are great in the long term but not necessarily in the short term. So, if you are close to retirement, below five years, you could stop the premiums and switch to a bank 3a instead. Or, you could be more conservative, depending on your asset allocation.

It is probably worth mentioning that doing that may prevent you from taking on another life insurance 3a. But that is probably a good thing.

3. Break the contract

The third option is to go a little further and entirely break the contract. With that, you stop paying, and you get back the money from the insurance company.

With this option, you will get back the buyback value. This value is based on the current value minus some cancelation fees. Usually, this value is zero in the first few years of the contract. You have no choice but to transfer this value to another 3a account.

Once again, we can simulate this. I will assume that by canceling the contract, you will lose an extra 20% of the value compared to what you would have in life insurance 3a. This assumption is not precise since, in theory, you would lose more during the first few years and less during the following years. However, this allows us to make a simple simulation.

You may lose more than 20% or less than that based on your life insurance company. Unfortunately, they are not very transparent about these fees.

Here is what would happen if we were to break the contract after 5, 10, and 15 years.

We can see that the penalties can make a significant dent, but the returns of a good 3a easily recover this.

Again, the earlier you break the contract, the better the results will be in retirement. This effect is due to the compounding of the invested 3a.

I should repeat the disclaimer for the previous strategy: if you have only a few years, the stock market’s returns may not be great, depending on the timing. Therefore, breaking your contract a few years before retirement is not a great idea.

Comparing the three strategy

Here are all three strategies together on our graph to summarize them.

The difference between the worst and best strategies is almost 200’000 CHF! Such an amount of money can make a very significant difference in your life in retirement.

Unless you are very close to retirement, you should do something about your life insurance 3a. And doing something means either releasing your premiums or entirely breaking the contract.

The earlier you can do something, the better your returns will be in the long term. And generally, it should only take a few years to recover the loss from breaking the contract.

So, what makes the most sense is to break the contract and move the little money you get back into a good 3a and then invest regularly into that 3a. Releasing the premiums is also an excellent strategy that can make a lot of difference.

Life insurance 3a and mortgage

If you have tied your life insurance 3a with a mortgage for indirect optimization, you may be unable to change your life insurance.

Indeed, if you are using it for indirect amortization, your life insurance 3a policy belongs to the bank. Therefore,  you will not be able to make any changes to the contract without changing the mortgage contract.

In these cases, the best option is to wait until the next contractual deadline for your mortgage. Then, you can either switch to direct amortization or use another third pillar for indirect amortization.

Of course, you can also ask your bank to see if there is a quicker way out.

What will I do with our life insurance 3a?

By now, you know that I also have a life insurance 3a. And if you have read my previous article on life insurance third pillar, you will know that my life insurance policy is really bad.

At first, before writing these two articles, I thought I would keep it as a reminder of my error. However, recently, I was thinking of lowering the premium from 300 CHF per month to 100 CHF since it seemed to be possible. Since I had to wait a few more years because of my mortgage, I wrote these articles to support my evidence.

At this point, I have realized that my life insurance 3a needs to stop. Before, I did not know it was possible to stop paying the premiums completely.

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So, I plan to release the premiums in 2024, when I can renegotiate my mortgage. At this point, I will remove the life insurance 3a from my mortgage, switch to direct amortization, and start to invest in finpension 3a fully.

Since the money in the contract is relatively small (about 10K CHF), I think I will keep the money inside the life insurance 3a and consider it as bonds. I will keep this as a reminder of my error. Mathematically, it would make more sense to take it out and move it to my finpension account. But the difference would not be life-changing.

Conclusion

If you are trapped with a bad life insurance 3a, I strongly encourage you to do something about it. At least you should learn more about how they deliver very poor returns, have high fees, and are not transparent.

We can see from the results of this article that doing nothing may cost you a lot of money in retirement. Before doing this analysis, I thought of doing nothing. However, I now realize it does not make sense.

Once I can renegotiate my mortgage, I will free my life insurance 3a from the bank. Then, I will release the premiums and invest more in finpension 3a.

If, after this article, you need to find a good 3a, you should read about the best third pillars in Switzerland.

What about you? What will you do with your life insurance 3a?

Recommended reading

• More articles about Retire in Switzerland
• More articles about Retirement
• Vested benefits accounts: All you need to know!
• Should You Contribute to Your Second Pillar in 2023?
• How many years until you can retire?