Hello,
maybe I have missed that, but I haven’t seen anyone going through early withdrawal process from VIAC yet. As they are relatively new on the market and most of us are rather in wealth accumulating phase, I decided to let you know about the process I just went through (buying a house), especially that I remember that some people were concerned if it will be easy/possible to get the money out when the time comes :).
Short version: thanks to incredible support from VIAC, the process is smooth, easy and cheap!
Long version:
Thanks to their online nature, the process is easy. You have to request closing the portfolios, which can be done via app or website. Then you’ll receive the closing PDF forms. Exactly the same for each portfolio, apart from portfolio number on the 1st page. Fortunately, they are fine with just getting one form, with other portfolios added manually to the list of portfolios you want to close. One page has to be signed by the notary/bank/3rd party receiving the amount. After this is done, you can send the form by email and that’s it! After a few days, the money has been transferred.
What I really want to point out is that support from VIAC is incredible:
- They are very responsive.
- They try to find the best solution for you to minimise the costs. E.g. there is a withdrawal fee of 300 CHF, if the financing bank is not a WIR bank. After informing me about it via chat, they immediately suggested to transfer the funds to 3rd pillar accounts in our financing bank (which is done for free), so we can avoid this fee completely. As we didn’t want to postpone signing the contract further (we needed 3rd pillar money for part of initial 10% payment), they had another good news as regards this fee. First of all, the fee doesn’t depend on number of portfolios. Secondly, as I was closing both mine and my wife’s accounts, they told me that this fee can be shared, so at the end we have paid 150 CHF each.
However, there is one thing that I could do better. As I requested closing of all portfolios, immediately after the transfers, our VIAC accounts have been closed, so we cannot login anymore to for example open new portfolios and we lost all our “refer my friend” bonuses… I think if before final closure we would have opened a new, empty portfolios, we would not lose it.
Hope that helps!
