OK, its that time of year when the statement for my ‘with profits bonus’ endowment policy arrives. I’ve paid £1356 in over a year and its increased in value by………… £319 😯 After a 25 minute phone call to the company a smart mouthed ‘financial adviser’ explained why I should continue paying it off until it matures in 4 years. By their calculations I’ll be £10k short at the end of it. I’m now paying extra on the loan to reduce the amount. Any serious suggestions for what i can do next? I can’t claim for misdirection when I was sold it as I have nothing in writing to back up the claims the salesman made at the time about how much i would make on it….. the scumbag!

Got shot of mine, wasn’t going to throw more money at a sh*te “investment”.

JJ your problem is not reserved just for endowment policies. Anyone with an investment linked to the stock market will have experienced the same thing – the value will have gone down significantly because the stock market has gone down.

Don’t rush to get upset about endowments, they are not sh*te investments as andy says, they can actually be very good but you do still need to keep saving in line with growth rates and right now, with interest rates at .5% and in the midst of a recession, no one has decent growth rates.

What is the overall value of the fund compared to what you have paid in in total? You can work out the annualised rate of return by taking the Nth square root of the total return where n=the number of years you’ve been paying in. I bet it doesn’t look too bad on that basis plus most endowments also include an element of life insurance which will have saved you money.

Take heart my boy, we’re all in the crap here!

You could try and sell on the TEP market.

Only 4 years to go! Don’t cash it in.

Oh and generally you do not need hard evidence to get compensation from the provider, I have settled many complaints in the past where only verbal assurances were given.