There are many reports (some here) of people who received less money (surrender value) than the sum they paid in after years of contributions.
Insurance aside - which many don’t need - that literally is worse than nothing.
Many would be better off by doing nothing and letting the money accumulate even on their salary account at 0% - than paying into a product that will have a negative overall return for many years.
Myself included, I paid 13766 in and got 8150 out. Good thing is the Quality Fund at Finpension has already made up about 10% of my loss to date 
What I meant, and it’s not to be confused for being a recommendation for these terrible products, is that if the flipside is doing nothing with this money, and one keeps with it until they’re 65, and claims the tax credits then they will probably come out better of than not doing anything at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I tell anyone who’ll listen to avoid 3A life insurance like the plague, but need to be balanced about it.
Hi, I moved to Switzerland less than a year ago, and very recently (about a month ago) I had a meeting with a financial advisor to do my taxes, he then explained to me also how the pillar works and he convinced me in choosing Swiss Life Dynamic Elements Duo as 3rd pillar.
Unfortunately I did not do my research properly and I just trusted him, but now reading a bit online I’m thinking that I made a mistake.
I am a 27 years old living with my girlfriend, and the the premium is 588CHF per month.
No payments have been collected yet.
What do you advise to do? If it was a mistake, how easy is it to close the swisslife 3a pillar account and choose a different one?
Call them and close it. There is a surrender value (of now 0) francs. Shouldn’t be a problem. If it is, just don’t pay it (suspend the contract). You’ll lose the insurance, but who cares.
Go for a 3a solution from finpension or viac, as discussed a lot here.
You should be able to close it (transfer it elsewhere). Your financial “advisor” will likely try to stall, so be prepared to be persistent and try to move fast.
(Note: your “advisor” probably earns thousands in fees when you sign up, and likely won’t receive much if you don’t keep paying for a few years, so your interests are very much not aligned)
Thank you everyone, i just sent an email to swiss life, my contract started on the 1st of March so technically I’m within the 30days in which I can cancel easily.
Let’s see…
Yeah just kill it before it gives birth. If you haven’t paid anything you haven’t lost anything. The advisor (who gets a payment of thousands the moment your pen lifts from the contract) will probably need to reimburse SwissLife.
I’m kind of curious how they’re selling this, what his proposition was.
I mean saving and investing something for the future and saving tax - surely that can’t be everything to make you sign a contract to pay them hundreds of hard-earned Francs every month, can it?
They‘ve got to tell people what they’re getting out of such plan, don’t they?
I can’t give you exact info on this since I can’t really remember properly, I was shown basically a comparison between 3/4 companies, and swiss life definitely came on top in regards to the befits.
To be honest this is totally on me since I did not do any research on the pillars and I thought it was normal to have insurance with it, also regarding the cost my understanding was that it was for the big part invested and didn’t think it was too high of a premium. Also he was clear about the fact that they don’t get anything from companies so that he could stay “unbiased”.
Well, I learned my lesson I guess
My own experience being signed up with SwissLife (could have been any of the other insurances out there) was more of a long game:
I used to get phonecalls all the time but they were from kids - a lot of them from DeVere - literally screaming down the phone about how I “can save 65000 CHF in taxes by the time I retire”.
I ignored them until a grown man was on the other side of the line and calmly asked me if I want to learn about the Swiss pension system - no strings attached or obligations of any kind. We booked a call, he explained everything perfectly well, then this lead to another call where he offered to talk to me about long-term investing. Compound interest, broadly diversified index funds, keeping costs down (LOL in hindsight), all perfectly explained, heard it once learnt it once.
Then he “offered” that I walk him through my finances, plans for the future etc etc so he can “offer” some advice etc and then I had a contract in my hands, signed happily and rode into the sunset 
It was a long game and masterfully done, over a month, 4 phonecalls, a lot of back and forth, chatty, personable guy.
You need to understand, coming from Greece I didn’t expect there’d be such bad deals in Switzerland. I mean this is Switzerland right, people are straight shooting here, what could be safer than investing your pension with a Swiss insurance agency, they’re the best in the world, right?
I did query why the contract said “Life Insurance” when all I’d been talking with the guy about was having an invested pension, he said “oh that’s no big deal, it’s only going to eat about 25% of your money per year”. Nah, he didn’t say that, he said “oh that’s no big deal, it’s only 35CHF/month and your family and your income are protected if touch wood you get hit by a falling piano on the way to Coop”. That 35CHF/month was nowhere to be seen in writing though.
Uh no, the guy who called me said they are independent and offered contracts with SwissLife and AXA. Another guy (an accountant I talked to for tax returns) said the same and then offered me a 3A with Zurich. They are not saying the whole truth until you ask: they will say upfront they don’t WORK for the insurance companies and that’s true - that’s the hook to pre-empt being ask if they get a benefit from it. But they do get paid from them for signing people up - I asked my guy point blank and he said he does.
Saying anything else would be a criminal offence. And frankly it makes sense, one would be naive to think all these phonecalls etc come for free, though I remember a member here saying they got a call from a person who said they are “a agent of the Gemeinde helping newcomers”, this sounds extremely fishy and basically illegal.
There is a reason why SwissLife and alike make use of brokers: they can always put the responsibility for bad advice on the brokers.
According to Art. 45b VAG/LSA (Federal law on the supervision of insurance companies), the brokers must inform on the kickbacks they get. This article was newly introduced with the revision of Jan 1st, 2024.
It remains to be seen how prominent this information will be made (e.g., fine prints, etc.) and if this will deter people from signing those products when they see how much the person in front of them would earn from the contracts.
That’s great! (and some characters)
This. 27 years old and maximum 3a amount? 10k+ in provision easily.
I think the main benefit of Life insurance based 3a is actually insurance. Everything else is added benefit.
So it might be a good product for people who want an insurance and want to save taxes at same time. It has its disadvantages as we all know and they should also be well understood.
I think when someone has never invested in 3a, it’s much easier to convince them to invest into 3a insurance versus people who already have 3a in frankly or finpension.
They make you believe that it’s a good product if these are your purposes, but in reality you can get a pure life insurance and 3a with VIAC, finpension, etc. with the same or even better benefits at a fraction of the cost without paying 1’000s as a commission to the agent.
It’s catastrophically expensive for what it is. One can get pure life insurance for half the cost and double the payout. I’ll defend that it is a solution for anyone not wanting to think about it and do some passive investing. But it’s still infuriating how so many newcomers - including myself - get done by this.
I understand the sentiment
But lot of people don’t know that there are cheaper options out there
Most people started with 3a plans from their banks until they moved to Finpension, VIAC, Frankly etc and let’s not forget the passive investment only works in presence of active investment. If everyone was passive then market will collapse. So even though I am passive investor, I hope active will work on their fees reduction and continue to exist
Same thing is happening with 3a insurance too. Traditional system has much higher fees. Disrupters are offering better solutions but still would take longer time to become first choice for most. Hence people make such mistakes
Fortunately for me. When I was new , I was offered 3a insurance and I didn’t invest. Not because I was smart but because I didn’t want commitment of X years to keep investing in that scheme. But on the other hand, I did end up starting 3a investment account with bank. Only few years back I moved the money out.
Agree, this is why I am trying to remain objective and fair.
3A with a bank is pretty good already, it is 100% safe (not vs inflation but safer than most other things people do) and gives a tax credit. 3A with insurance may have an upside vs a bank, if someone is unlucky enough where the insurance component actually kicks in, otherwise I think it’s objectively worse.
Finpension, VIAC and the like are a very very very small minority in the market - Europe is decades behind the US in terms of tools for financial planning and financial literacy, largely because we have, or had, decent pension expectations through mandatory pension contributions. At the same time we’re much better off in terms of being sensible and not trying to emulate whichever celebrity is hot today, and ruining our finances in the process.
The great thing for passive investing is that very little active investing is needed to provide the necessary corrections to the market which give, after fees, an edge to passive investing. I am confident active investing will continue happening even considering mammoth pension funds (like those of the US) being much more passive. I have no fear of passive investing dominating anything, primarily because it’s human nature to be competitive, it’s human flaws that make everyone think they’re smarter than anyone else, and because I know that every bit of inefficiency created by passive investing will eventually be discovered and exploited by active investors, therefore correcting it. There’s an interesting idea here: when I was trying to understand why shorting and options even exist I stumbled across the discussion that although these mechanisms have a definite winner and loser on each trade, they work for the benefit of the whole (market) system by fixing problems, therefore keep things in balance.
It is true that most people are not like those here, that’s why I maintain that even though it’s objectively a bad deal, 3A with life insurance is probably a decent deal for anyone not interested to learn more/take on more personal responsibility.
Hi @Lulu ! I am going through the same. In my case the broker deliberately lied to me. The possibility to transfer the money sitting in my 3a pillar account at any time was one of the mandatory conditions for me.
This was of course asked by me and confirmed by the broker many times but he never mentioned once that fees and who know what else would be deducted.
Of course this was just in words because at that time I was still naive and believed the system so did not ask for a confirmation also in written.
Also, in my case I asked to be sent all documents related to the insurance for my review, and the broker only sent me projections and a doc with some info but never the full condition document.
When we had the second meeting I based my questions on what I was provided with, he lead me to sign a contract on his tablet (telling me that this is common practice and much better than online signature). I said I wanted to read it, part of it says that I was sent the conditions (which I thought were the documents I was sent), and of course this was not the case
(I will not even mention how sneaky it was the whole process in convincing me that I absolutely needed the extra insurances because “otherwise I would have needed to leave Switzerland within 2 months if I lose my job”)
For sure I was naive and scared but I am also very disgusted by the fact that this is even legal.
However I cancelled the contract officially, since then nobody came back to me, just the same broker that scammed me trying to change my mind.
Since I confirmed my decision nothing happened, I asked to reach out to someone to confirm my surrender value and they initially gave me a number that does not work and then never answered.
@Lulu how did it work for you?