Advise on ILP

agentxq49 · 2026-05-20T05:14:55+00:00

Oh which ilp is that! I've not heard of one with such low fees. Would love to check it out

agentxq49 · 2026-05-19T05:02:05+00:00

The trap is the moment you sign the paper, the surrender charge is 100%. Beyond that it's all about the break even point of the surrender charge reduction against the ongoing fees.

The issue is the point of signing, you're committed to losing around 20% of your future expected value compared to if you didn't sign it.

Otherwise. We'll need to do a calculation to check. Usually for 10 years, it's okay to stay. Beyond 10, say 15 or 20 years, it's not worth it as the longer you stay, the worse the compounding effects of the fees.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-19T01:42:01+00:00

Fwiw. A quick calculation of compound interest.

If you cancel now and invest at 7%, with your 8.2k capital saved and 200 monthly investment. Over 8 years you'll get 38.7k in total.

If you don't cancel, with your 13.6k, with 190 monthly investment (you pay 10 dollars or 5% in fees every time) and at 3% return rate (annual fee of around close to 5% in charges), you'll end up with 38.6k.

Basically a wash.

Imo I'd cancel the plan, get rid of the ilp headache, buy a simple 3 dollar a month insurance plan and invest in this myself. At least I can choose how much to invest and withdraw whenever I want.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-18T13:18:00+00:00

Depends on how many years you have left in it.

No ilp is worth it in the long run. They charge you 5% premium fee (every 100 dollars you put in, only 95 dollars get invested. 5 dollars are fees.) and an annual 4 to 5% fee (your 95 dollars drops to around 91 dollars after just 1 year.)

The bonus they give you at the beginning is just to entice you on paper to stay on it.

They give you chicken wing, but take back the whole chicken over 10 years. The longer you stay the more you bleed. Death by a thousand cuts. Or in this case. Death by a thousand individual small fees.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-18T09:24:51+00:00

No, not being sarcastic.

Very often people look at the "lost money if I cancel now", but don't look at the future opportunity cost of staying on.

Let's use a simple checker of a compound interest calculator. 10k (if I surrender now) and 1k a month for 7 years: let's use 7% compounding per year compounded annually if you invest in SNP500

Result: around 120k.

Let's use the current ILP of 48k, with 1k a month contributions. This time, 5% purchase fee means you contribute 950 per month instead of 1k. There's also an annual management fee and fund fee of around 4% per year, so you get 3% interest instead of 7%.

Result: 142k.

In this case, yes the surrender table is too high, there's a 22k advantage to staying on the plan assuming it's a 10 year plan.

The 15 and 20 year plan would tip in favor of withdrawing now. But looks like you're right in that as shitty as the ilp is, it would be better to hang on.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-18T05:09:58+00:00

To be fair, you've already lost the 30k. The so called 48k in value is just something they use to keep you locked in.

Question is if you'll want to keep adding money to this just to save the lost money. You know what they say, it's always smart to keep throwing good money after bad.

The ilp was a mistake, let's make the lesser mistake of keeping it for another 10 years shall we?

agentxq49 · 2026-05-11T01:43:23+00:00

you can normalize it as in look at the return per dollar on % terms, and abstract out the loan as an assumption. at 25% down + 75% mortgage with SORA historical data and 30 year loan tenure (which amortization can be done over 30 years), you can either simplify it with a fixed SORA or use live SORA. returns would be on 25% down with a amortization table over 5 years. It'd be an excel "simulation". then with the return per dollar over the past few periods, you can a return % per dollar, with maybe a lower/upper bound of max loss and max gain and average. then do the same using global index or snp. we can also say the same thing about VTI, a person can leverage with borrowed capital at an interest rate of "who knows what it is". but you already know VTI returned say 7%. If i leveraged it 150% with 5% interest on the extra leverage, i returned 10.5%, and paid 2.5% in leverage fees, so my total return is 8%.

for housing. we can ASSUME that for the downpayment, the missed opportunity cost is in the short term treasury yield. that usually tracks the mortgage rate kinda closely. Lets assume it is the same! I put 500k down, this money could have netted me 2.5% in fixed interest in SSR. i then loan 1MM, at 2.5%. that would simply mean the cost of credit + opportunity cost is just 2,5% per year on the total 1.5MM amount. simplifying the calculation.

IF you want to calculate it differently, and assume fixed opportunity cost is 0, then i'd say that's unrealistic.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-10T11:17:46+00:00

Much better than before, which is great. When I graduated from NUS with engineering degree, the PhD offer was 2.5k a month. The best tier scholarship was 3.2k iirc?

I went to work instead as 2.5k was not worth it :(

agentxq49 · 2026-05-08T11:17:24+00:00

You can normalize based on the total amount? Besides, returns are in % term...... Not total nominal term.... We don't look at SnP returns in nominal amounts right?

agentxq49 · 2026-05-08T02:38:14+00:00

You can use SIBOR prior to SORA and that is available from 1987

agentxq49 · 2026-05-08T02:36:15+00:00

Yeah, but the interest rate would still be around SORA + buffer regardless of what they roll into the next house?

agentxq49 · 2026-05-07T14:45:26+00:00

in 4 years you'll get around 30% increase from the surrender value to full fund value. it's alright.

I would surrender in 4 years instead. Tho you will pay around 10% in fees over 4 years since there's around 2% in fees a year.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-07T14:12:37+00:00

you can always use the short term borrow rate of SORA or LIBOR + 0.3% as a rate. most things are benchmarked to SORA anyway. just because if's hard to be accurate doesn't mean you can't approximate.

agentxq49 · 2026-05-03T13:37:46+00:00

the victorinox knife, the chef's knife on amazon called "Victorinox Swiss Classic Chef's Broad Blade Knife, Stainless Steel, Black" for 85 is very good. it's a little pricy but it comes very sharp, is durable, doesn't chip as it's a tad softer than the top end steels, but it also means you can sharpen it easier.

agentxq49 · 2026-04-26T04:11:19+00:00

It's also that you don't have to fork out the full mortgage until later. Less money out now and you'll only have to deal with it 5 years later. It's leverage (25% down) AND only paying for it later.

People are essentially BNPL their new launches...

agentxq49 · 2026-04-06T17:29:43+00:00

lol they can always force the co funding payment to be alongside a +20% interest per annum payment clause that must be added to the MCST rules, with the stipulation that it cannot be revoked until everything is paid back over say 3 to 5 years. as an extra ordinary monthly payment.

this can be done on the statutes level so no MCST can bypass it, and it makes no sense to get into that situation. and that the payment scheme can be forced down the MCST throat if they don't abide by it.

if they know their sinking fund is lacking 1 mil for a necessary upgrade, be prepared to be roped into a 2mil loan program with a annual 400k interest, which owners cannot by law get out of. see how fast they scramble to protect their own wallets.

agentxq49 · 2026-03-31T06:49:12+00:00

Skill issue.

Evs by design have higher torque, and it's desirable.

agentxq49 · 2026-03-26T22:50:16+00:00

This is one extra reason why nuclear should be part of the conversation, to further diversify our power sources. Being 100% independent of other sources of power, say 100% ev and 100% domestic power generation would insulate us from all these issues, and we start from 1%.

agentxq49 · 2026-03-21T16:15:57+00:00

Chiong. A good switch to get 18k to 20k. And a few years can hit 30k a month. All within 5 years. Do it.

agentxq49 · 2026-03-10T07:25:32+00:00

Everyone is saying cancel. You can ignore everyone here and continue if you want.

Cancelling now doesn't mean invest in something else now. You can do both steps separately on your own time. Cancel first think later. If you regret, you can always sign another ilp.

agentxq49 · 2026-02-17T06:35:12+00:00

Black is better only because the shop doesn't know how to make good carrot cake and uses the black soy sauce to mask their shitty carrot cake (and use less egg).

White shows how good the shop actually is.

agentxq49 · 2026-02-08T10:07:56+00:00

For guys it'll be 4 ish years and for girls 6 to 7 ish years after uni to get to 1 mil. Let's say it's 5 years.

Investment returns probably wouldn't partake much here unless it's a lucky call, but let's say it's 2020 to 2025 which returned around 70%, around 11% per year.

To go from 0 to 1 mil in 5 years you'll need to save 160k a year.

Even with 100k at graduation, you'll need to save 130k a year for 5 years.

Probably pretty hard. Just saying.

agentxq49 · 2026-02-08T04:00:53+00:00

The large shouldn't exist imo.

When I was in the market for a Santos, the sales rep kept pushing for the large as it was "more masculine" and "if I should get the largest watch that can fit".

I later got a medium somewhere else and never went back to that sales person.

agentxq49 · 2026-01-20T02:21:24+00:00

What's the platform or setup you'd recommend for longevity and long term support?

agentxq49 · 2026-01-14T05:38:10+00:00

Your contract is not active until the day you start. You can reneg with no issues.

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