I’m a customer of ICICI Prulife and have also have policies Lifetime and Smartkid.
I’m also a customer of LIC and have Komal Jeevan policy of LIC (Smart Kid is a competitor for this).
Now it all depends on how do you look at this unique products that ICICI Prudential has to offer.
Are you looking this as an investment?
Are you looking this as an insurance?
Well, I would say it is a perfect flexible blend of both. It has tried to combine best of both worlds.
Sure, the fees are at higher side. But they have kept it transparant to the end user.
Would you know how much LIC is charging for their policies? no, they have drafted out a rigid plan with some figures and you wouldn’t know how much they keep out of your premium and how much is invested. There is hardly any policy that can be surrendered back to LIC. [I don’t know about the recent ones, I hope they would have added some flexibility as time demands ]
One review said that you should keep your investments and insurance seperate. Very true!
Provided you have enough knowledge of both these sectors.
Investment in mutual funds definitely carries some risk and the expectations of the returns from direct investments in MFs will definitely be higher than ’investment’ in pru life.
But for a customer who has not thought of anthing beyond a bank’s fixed deposit, this would be a good opportuinity to scratch the surface of equity market without taking much risk.
50% in balancer and 50% in maximiser is a safe mixture.
One can assume higher returns on a longer period of time. Since Insurance product demand longer commitment, automatically the investment is expected to yield much higher returns on maturity.
However, transparancy to such an level (NAV) makes some customers impatient as a setback in sharemarket directly brings down their current fund value. But one should appreciate that the Sum Assured is never changed and during bad market condition as well the risk is well covered and thus the insurance portion is unaffected.
From my example of lifetime, I paid a premium of 30000 and after the deductions 24000 were invested in balancer and maximiser 50% each. Over about next 4-5 months, according to NAV calculation, my fund valur regained almost 29000 but a market setback then after reduced it to again around 24500. But now again now almost it is recovered to 28000.
Had it been an old LIC policy, you wouldn’t even know where your 30000 went. Let aside the proportion of funds, switching flexibility, etc.
Even the policy document is readable and is made very clear for a general man
So, I recommend this product even to novice customers to make their future safer.
However, I have no idea about how easy or difficult it is for claims settlement. But I saw a claims form attached with the policy document whereas with LIC, there is no clue about how to file a claim other than to ask an LIC agent.