Recently there has been quite an aggressive marketing effort to promote the new NTUC Income PayMyUni endowment product. Sad to say this is a lemon (i.e. a very lousy product).. Why? Here are the reasons:

For those who uses endowment for their children's education are those with low risk appetite when come to saving up for children's education. Therefore, an endowment is suitable. But a participating endowment contains two parts: Guaranteed cash value + Non-guaranteed cash value. The non-guaranteed cash value depends on the insurer's life fund performance which itself is subjected to market risk. Therefore, those with low risk appetite can only rely on the guaranteed cash value. The non-guaranteed cash value cannot be relied on. In the past, insurer used to give very optimistic projections on their non-guaranteed cash value but in reality their performance has been very disappointing. Other then Asia Life, all other insurers have cut their bonuses.

THEREFORE, the guaranteed cash is extremely important in such endowment plan. In a quote that I generated for this policy, the guaranteed cash value was $200,000 but the total premium paid is  $223,330. This means that it is POSSIBLE to lose money in such an endowment plan.

HENCE, this plan is a lemon. There are other endowment that has high guaranteed cash value - higher then the premium paid. Customers should get this kind of plan.