I have had a very bad experience of buying an insurance product without studying the basics. The sales guys never give you the finer details. Its the responsibility of the buyer to dig into the details. Based on my experience I have only one thing to suggest. Never get locked into insurance schemes for investment purposes. Use insurance only for covering the risk. Hence term insurance is the only product that suits you. Beware of other complex options where investments are clubbed with insurance.For me the upfront charges were killing ! They charged more than 50% of the first year premium as admin charges.
Not sure why the admin charges are so high. The performance of units is not as good as MFs which are specialists in investments. Citibank is a partner in crime. They sold me the insurance without proper information and giving me details. They never told me about the admin charges. Not sure why IRDA is silent and letting people suffer by getting locked into such schemes.Further to my earlier post, I followed up with the BSLI folks to get all the charges and given below is the laundry list of hidden charges which are never disclosed when selling you ULIP.
Given below is the relevant extract from their response.=We would further like to inform you that from your premium received, we deduct a loading fee. The policy loading fee is an up-front charge recovered as a percentage of the Life Insurance Coverage Premium and varies as per the year in which the payment is made. The same is 65 % of the base plan premium in the first policy year. This is due to high administrative expenses in the initial years of the policy, as we need to recover costs towards commissions, underwriting and other activities involved with the issuance of the policy.