UBS 3a Pillar / Vitainvest fees

Banks, Insurances & Third Pillar
1

Hi everybody,

This is my first post in your community forum and feeling excited about it :blush:. I am also a newbie in the whole world of savings investment (unfortunately… :money_with_wings: :money_with_wings:). In the last couple of weeks, I am trying to increase my awareness and more than that my literacy on this topic. I bought myself several books suggested here and there, and trying to read as much as possible from this forum as well).

As a first step, I wanted to check my 3a pillar investments in UBS that I kept in a managed fund (Vista Invest World 50 Sustaintable U) over the last ~3-4 years. As far as I understood from the forum, many people uses VIAC or similar solutions for their 3a pillar accounts due to high management/commissioning costs on mainstream banks (e.g. UBS). Anyways, (being a complete noob) I wanted to check how much of those fees were charged in that regard to my 3a pillar custody account in UBS over the years yesterday and surprisingly :astonished: I could not find anything in the transaction history of my account. (p.s. I can see such recurring costs in my other non-3a investment account (quarterly management cost fee debited on the non-3a investment account)).

In the “Fees” tab of the link that I shared above for the fund, I can see a “flat-fee” 1.5% that says is charged to the “fund’s assets”. I assume this means, this is not directly charged to my account, but reflected to the performance of the fund, right? Also, there is a 1.2% management fee, that says " PM-fees charged to the NAV p.a." Is this also reflected to the net asset value of the fund?? Basically, if I understood correctly, all these costs are somehow hidden in the performance of the fund? Anyways, I found this very “not transparent” :confused: and now looking for another option with the help of your community.

If I understood correctly, VIAC provides a set of investment options that a customer can adjust manually depending on the risk that they can afford for their savings. I observed that (different than UBS Vista fund), VIAC offered strategies and popular choices in this community avoids “Bonds” in their selection. Can you explain me also why is this the case? Isn’t “diversification” should be the goal for my long-term investment plan? :nerd_face: :face_with_monocle:

Thanks in advance and have a nice Friday afternoon!

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Correct.

The UBS 3a funds will underperform VIAC by ~1%/year.

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Yes. There is nothing wrong with the fact that fees are deducted from the funds asset, it is completely normal. They are just 10-20 times higher than those of cheap index funds.

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Bonds currently offer very low or even negative returns, meaning you’d be better off holding cash than bonds. In general bonds are used as some kind of safe haven when the stock markets crash, as the bonds are not highly correlated to stocks and are more or less unaffected by the stock market. The bonds deliver low bit steady returns over their holding period.
While you are young you should invest more in equities as the returns will be higher over the long run and a crash here and there doesn’t matter over a long time horizon. As you get older, you should increase the allocation to bonds. A rule of thumb is to have 100 - your age invested in stocks, that’s just a rough rule and not an investment advice. You also need to keep in mind that your second pillar assets can be seen as bonds as well (most people here including myself count them as bonds), so you probably already have a relatively high allocation to bonds.

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