did you send the cancellation of the contract with the post? registered mail or just A / A+ post ?
Well I have to share this story here to share my frustration haha
A friend of mine just signed a 3a combined insurance policy! A “friend” of him, who obviously works for a big insurer comparny offering this products, talk him about openning a 3a, explaining him that the 3a combined with an insurance is the best choice. I explain to him how a big scam schema -not with this words- this was and the details but he finally decided to go this way as he is a professional, a good guy and other people that have this same product are happy…
I definitely failed to pass the message but I also fell that people often trust those that works in finances while I believe those are specially the ones that you should NOT listen - or at least contrast what they are saying…
I had a similar situation with another friend who was recently with a financial advisor and give her very bad insights on what to do with her money. We had a chat and then she checked all the information by herself and realized most of the things were actually “bad advice”. I guess that most people follow what this advisors say, as they are experts and that’s it.
Did you had similar experiences with family members, friends, colleagues? At the end I don’t care because It’s not my money but it just make no sense for my rational mind haha
I would also be curious how many people have 3a insurance products in switzerland, and particularly the amount of Swiss citizens / expats. Are there staitstics about this somewhere?
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I think we have to be fair to people who are not very familiar with personal finances
So they prefer to take “expert” advice versus not doing anything.
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Yes, you are right, specially when arriving to the country. It is just weird to me… because there is plenty of information very easy to understand, as MP posts and the poorswiss among others, but we are not all wired the same way of course!
The think about ‘expert’ advice is that they are also very “convincing”, this people knows how to talk, they are very good and intuitive communicators so it is much easier to convince someone about anything hehe
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Yes, some similar experience. Don’t take personally 
these “experts” are above all “expert-sales-people”, and have flashy “professional” documents and presentations to show.
All you have to show are some links to “weird/geeky” websites and forums.
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you are right! 
I don’t take it personally, it just makes no sense haha but I mean from a “human” and emotional point of view it makes totally sense… who would you believe, an expert that knows his field or a random friend? Without notions on personal finances the decission is pretty clear.
That said, if someone knows about statistics on this field I would be curious! At the beginning I though that insurance 3a policies where mainly offered to expats but I’ve been meeting a lot of swiss citizens that also have this kind of insurance (without having any dependant…)
I have also learned not to give unsolicited advices.
Maybe your friends wanted to chitchat about it but not listen to your solutions.
I have seen 1 friend few years ago felt into the Zurich insurance trap of combining flat, cars and 3a Life insurance.
I have tried to mention what I was doing with my investment and my returns but they were not really interested so I’ve moved on to another subject.
It’s painful to imagine their reaction in few years if they figured it out.
On the positive side…
Your friend is forced to save monthly a fixed amount, has life insurance, potentially gets some return.
Would he have put the same amount regularly in a etf and stayed invested after a downturn?
Would he have not invested at all, but just spent all?
I dont think “do it yourself” investing is for everyone. Just as not everybody likes to fix things around the house…
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3a life insurance survivor here. The perspective is not right: a person new here, possibly having built up in their heads a utopian idea of Swiss fairness/transparency/efficiency/justice in their minds, is far FAR more likely to listen to a very friendly person “representing” one of the “top 3 insurance firms in Switzerland and the world” coming with fancy presentations and friendly advice (wolves in sheep’s clothing) than an unformatted (edit: just checked, it’s more formatted now than 3 years ago!) website called “the poor swiss” or another full of affiliate links and smilies called “the mustachian post”. After all, the internet is full of scammers (right?), and Switzerland is the land of safety and stability, and what in the world could be safer than a Swiss insurance company, right?
I know because I have been through this journey already, and even if I lost CHF 5500 to 3a life insurance, plus another 1000 in opportunity cost (as their ETFs are dogshit) what remained actually valuable is that this advisor explained the Swiss pension system, compound interest, DCA, time in the market, diversification to me very well. Expensive lesson, but valuable.
In hindsight one of my neighbours (also foreign, of course) told me within our first week here “Switzerland is not Switzerland, you’ll see”, I got it much later
Spot on, and balanced.
Yes, totally, we give too much credit to certain institutions! Specially when they are just corporations trying to make profit, as anyone else.
I am not saying we should give credit to MP or the poorswiss (because I don’t agree with all they say either, and they take tons of profit with affiliated links too), for me it is more about contrasting information.
If a top insurance representative told me something the first thing I would do is to check the information online and contrast with other providers for example to check for better alternatives so I can take an informed decission. However, this requires time, a do-it-yourself mindset and willigness! For money-related decissions it is weird to me to believe the first come, specially when you are commiting yourself with a 20 year contract, giving them 7000 chf a year.
As you said, it is far more likely to believe a friend in the sector that to me, which I guess is totally normal
To come back to the original topic, there is one general thing I don’t really understand about this products, why would you contract a life insurance when you have no partner (or not married) and no kids? Who will benefit in that case from the life insurance?
Because it’s not sold as life insurance.
When I got the contract in my hands I was puzzled because it said “Life Insurance” on the top with big red letters, and I never once discussed life insurance with the broker, we always discussed about having an invested pension with tax saving.
I called him and asked him about it, he said something along the lines of “ah yeah, look, it’s an insurance company, they have to include an insurance component, it’s an extra really for your family and/or disability”, when I asked “how much does this cost?” he said “nothing, like CHF30/month”.
The first cold shower came when I realised my surrender value was ~40% lower than what I’d put in, and it wasn’t because the market had been bad. The second cold shower came when I realised that VT did 10% in CHF in 2023 and my 3A did 1.3%.
When I got the idea to quit it I pored over all documents and all emails I had trying to find this number, or any number about costs, in fact, and couldn’t find any as you’d expect. I even had questions on the TER as the summed TERs by weight of each of the 5 mutual funds they put me in didn’t add up to the TER on the contract. The broker kept telling me that the TER of the funds (which was inexplicably higher than the TER of the contract) doesn’t matter. Then I decided to quit it and take the loss. I’ve made about 30% of the loss back already in Finpension.
Edit: all the words they use are carefully chosen to absolve them of legal liability, nothing is said by chance or accident.
Edit 2: not dissing MP or thepoorswiss, great info in both places, my point was that a newcomer is unlikely to do this due diligence.
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