SBI Life Unit Plus Super ULIP Review

SBI Life Unit Plus Super is one more unit linked insurance plan offered by SBI Life insurance company. Let us review this policy today. The plan claims to meet the changing requirements of your life. Let us review that weather this plan really offers what it claims or not?

Key Features

•Guaranteed Additions of up to 75% of one annual regular premium on a regular premium policy, for a 30 year policy term, subject to the Policy being in force till the maturity date.

•No Policy Administration fee for first 5 years for Regular and Limited Premium Paying Term (LPPT) plans, thereby boosting your fund value

•No Premium Allocation Charge from 11th year onwards

•Guaranteed Additions starting as early as 10th policy year onwards

•Enhanced investment opportunity through 9 varied Fund Options including P/E Managed Fund, Index Fund & Top 300 Fund

•Option to pay Regular/Limited/ Single Premium; Switch or Redirect your premiums

•Flexible product with an option to increase/decrease your Sum Assured from 6th year onwards

•Life Insurance coverage, with minimum Sum Assured, based on your age

•Liquidity through Partial Withdrawals.

•Option to customize the product with a wide range of riders: SBI Life - Criti Care 13 Rider, SBI Life - Accidental Death Benefit Linked Rider, SBI Life - Premium Payor Waiver Benefit Rider and SBI Life - Income Sustainer Rider.

The minimum age of entry is 7 years and the maximum age of entry is 65 years. Age of maturity is 75 years. Premium payment term is 10, 15 and 30 years. Premium mode is Single or yearly. The minimum Single premium is Rs.65000 and the maximum single premium is Rs.1.5 lakhs. The Sum Assured is 20 times the annual premium. So for Rs.1 lakh of annual premium, you will get Rs.20 lakh of sum assured.

My Opinion -

In my opinion, this is a highly opaque financial product and the investors should avoid this plan in any way. What I don’t like about this plan is that, in their policy brochure available online they have nowhere mentioned various types of charges associated with this plan such as premium allocation charge, fund management charge and many other types of charge.

Second thing is that, there is not any information available like in which types of assets the fund will invest means equity, debt, money market or all and in how much proportion.

This is really important to know when you are going to lock your money for more than 10 years. This is because there is no sense of investing in debt/money market instruments when you are going to invest for more than 10 years.

And suppose if we assume that the policy will invest your money in equity than in which kind of stocks – Large, mid or small cap stocks? The risk appetite of all the investors is not the same.

Another thing I don’t like about such types of policy is, you can’t exit from it without paying huge exit/withdrawal charges. While this is not the case of mutual funds. In case of Mutual funds the entry load is 0% and the exit load is also 0% after 365 days. So if you think that your mutual fund is not performing well, you can exit from it without paying any exit loads/penalties. But this is not the case of ULIPs.

In my opinion, Term Insurance + Equity Diversified Mutual Funds (2-3) + PPF is still the best financial planning combination to protect your life and build some serious long time wealth.

What if you have already invested in SBI Life Unit Plus Super Plan?

Get out of it Right now.

Many people argue that, but exit will be associated with huge withdrawal charges. But well, still I will advise you to exit from this plan or at least stop paying more premiums in it. Rather than that I advise you to invest that money in some good equity diversified mutual fund carefully selected from the websites like Valueresearchonline.com with 5-10 years of time horizon.

This is really a costly policy and you should get out of it as early as possible. It’s the highly opaque financial product.