Author Topic: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed  (Read 136379 times)

quantum123

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #200 on: February 09, 2017, 08:23:39 PM »
The Quantum plan is designed for a fixed amount every month for the full term (20 years for some). You will be punished if you pay less than that agreed amount. The Oracle is a lumpsum scheme.

The funds are "common" funds. RL360 is supplying the access and administration.

I don't get the investment. Is there a 60000 lump sum with no additional contributions? Or do contributions continue? I thought I read somewhere in here that a person was paying a couple grand a month to them.

I don't really understand what the investments are in. Are they common funds that are available anywhere but Quantum happens to have their own fee structure?  Or do they have their own funds?

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #201 on: March 20, 2017, 07:53:35 AM »
I've been in the RL360 Quantum fund now for 4.5 years. I'll admit and say I was much more naive then than I am now, and I'm still pretty naive! But my senses started tingling late last year and after finding this site and some other stuff on Reddit I spoke to my advisor today who did nothing to allay my fears.
If I bail out by the end of this month I will lose about $20k and my wife is pretty mad to say the least...
I started with an $800/month deposit but reduced that to $300/month for the past 15 months or so. I was going to increase my premiums again but now I'm thinking just to cut my losses.
I've run the spreadsheets that I found on the earlier pages. Thanks a lot, they proved very insightful. But I have a question,
the Premiums Ifl Adjusted column, if the IOM RPI rate changes monthly how can you make an accurate chart? Do you have to input each time it changes?
On my RL360 portal is says my account is up 11.65% since inception. Initially that looks good until I worked out how much fees I'd paid over the past 4.5 years, admittedly my premium amount decreased so my overall return is lower.
When I look at the Profit/Loss column after 30 years though, that's pretty disheartening...

NoStacheOhio

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #202 on: March 20, 2017, 09:35:38 AM »
I've been in the RL360 Quantum fund now for 4.5 years. I'll admit and say I was much more naive then than I am now, and I'm still pretty naive! But my senses started tingling late last year and after finding this site and some other stuff on Reddit I spoke to my advisor today who did nothing to allay my fears.
If I bail out by the end of this month I will lose about $20k and my wife is pretty mad to say the least...
I started with an $800/month deposit but reduced that to $300/month for the past 15 months or so. I was going to increase my premiums again but now I'm thinking just to cut my losses.
I've run the spreadsheets that I found on the earlier pages. Thanks a lot, they proved very insightful. But I have a question,
the Premiums Ifl Adjusted column, if the IOM RPI rate changes monthly how can you make an accurate chart? Do you have to input each time it changes?
On my RL360 portal is says my account is up 11.65% since inception. Initially that looks good until I worked out how much fees I'd paid over the past 4.5 years, admittedly my premium amount decreased so my overall return is lower.
When I look at the Profit/Loss column after 30 years though, that's pretty disheartening...

Show her the spreadsheet, and the difference between just taking the loss now, and letting it drag out for another ~25 years. That's long enough for a child born today to get a Master's degree and start a career.

If she's just going to get mad that it happened in the first place, that's kind of petty. Plenty of people get suckered.

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #203 on: March 20, 2017, 09:44:59 AM »
Nah, she was initially skeptical of the whole thing as I could pay via credit card and she thought that dodgy, so as well as being mad at the whole thing it was also "I told you so!", haha

StockBeard

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #204 on: March 20, 2017, 09:46:43 AM »
You can assume a constant 3% for isle of man inflation for example. As far as I remember, that number doesn't have a huge impact on the overall result.

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #205 on: March 20, 2017, 09:59:50 AM »
Ok thanks.

quantum123

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #206 on: March 21, 2017, 12:48:55 AM »
Ok thanks.

Welcome to this very sad club... Please contact >angryperson< if you are interested in going after RL360.

If you cannot pay the 800usd until the plan is matured - then strongly consider to drop it! Smaller contributions will hardly cover the fees, which, asyou discovered yourself, are humongus. I am in 33000usd so I know all about what you are going through - my wife was also the smarter one :) My advisor is afterall trying to patch things up (most likely not to lose all of his bonus) which mean that my money also are not lost yet.

DavidAnnArbor

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #207 on: March 21, 2017, 08:46:15 AM »
ok MMM administrator please make this thread or make a warning about this company a wiki at the beginning of Investor alley.

It's time for MMM to do everything possible so other people aren't screwed over by this financial Madoff like scam !!!!

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #208 on: March 21, 2017, 08:44:39 PM »
So do you think that the even after 5 years, in my case, my "advisor" is still collecting her commission? She hasn't even replied to my email from two days ago and when I think about it, all the delays etc in communicating over the past years just makes me even more mad. So if I can help to screw her now, that would be some reward.
I'm going to take the hit and then put what I get back in a Vanguard index fund.
I'm really happy I found this, better late than never. And I'll say that given my troubles, my interest now in investing has increased dramatically. I'm reading Andrew Hallam's books and find them easy to understand.
So maybe a silver lining from all this? Try to be optimistic...

danclarkie

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #209 on: March 29, 2017, 01:59:56 AM »
Hey, Little Bird.

I believe I've been speaking with you on Reddit too.

To answer your point:

Quote
So do you think that the even after 5 years, in my case, my "advisor" is still collecting her commission?

No, the commission from the product dries up after the initial lock up period.
However, the firm gets a commission kickback from certain funds for every dollar they funnel into them.
So within your RL360 account you will be in the funds that pay the biggest kickback to the IFA firm.

It's unethical as fuck.

I notice you're in SE Asia, where exactly? I now live in Singapore.

I still get cold calls from these firms selling me this shit, I've had 2 this month.

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #210 on: March 29, 2017, 08:05:28 AM »
Thanks Dan.
I'm in Cambodia! Where the financial side matches the wild west nature of this Kingdom...

Wanderlust89

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #211 on: March 30, 2017, 05:02:40 AM »
How I wish I'd found this page 8 months ago! I have been paying $1500 into the Rl360 quantum for 8 months now so I'm $12k invested on a 25 year plan.

I'm a British expat based in Dubai, I'm in engineering and don't have a great knowledge of finance so I put my faith in a financial advisor recommended by a colleague. I'm actually not even annoyed at the advisor, everyone knows not to trust these guys out here, I went along knowing that he would try and sell me something that was best for his commission - and I still fell for his nice guy act and sales pitch. Only myself to blame.

I told him the $1500 is more than affordable at the moment but when I leave the Middle East in 5-10 years time I will need to drop my payments significantly, which he said was absolutely fine. Repeatedly brought up the 2 year payment break as well. When in reality, nobody should go near this plan unless they can guarantee full payments for the duration - and even then it seems it is a poor choice! I shouldn't have signed up until I 100% understood the fees and how it all works, but looking at the spreadsheets on this thread it's crystal clear that I need to get out now and start again.

I'm in a fortunate position where I'm saving around $7.5k a month at the moment so at least the rl360 money was only 20% of my savings. My plan is to cancel rl360 immediately then use the next few months educating myself on how to best invest my money (using this forum and similar ones, and the resources recommended by you guys), and hopefully won't be too long in making that 12k back.

An expensive lesson, but very happy I realised at this stage and not a few years down the line when I need to reduce payments!

SKRBM

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #212 on: April 05, 2017, 03:38:22 PM »
Same position as many others. Did not do a proper due diligence on this investment and considered it a safe bet to store some savings in. I am at month 37 with $1000 monthly contributions. My withdrawal amount is at approx $17,000 with an account balance of $41,000. I have attempted to use the templates provided within this post but still unsure if I have the inputs correct. Have been in touch with my advisor today who seems reluctant and at times ignorant of the RL360 structure, and continues to suggest that I come into the office for a chat. I don't blame him necessarily, but anyone with any financial sense should press for a full fee structure prior to signing to ensure that returns will at least be on par with a fund that can be accessed privately along with estimated re-balancing costs.

I found this site only as I figured this out on my own and asked this week to adjust my contribution down to the minimum. Would anyone still on the thread be able to clarify why paying the minimum for the remainder of the period is still a poor decision, in my case over withdrawing and forfeiting $24,000?

mmmburner

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #213 on: April 10, 2017, 07:48:23 PM »
Hi mods you URGENTLY need to put a 301 redirect in for this thread.

forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/i-dun-goofed/

Needs to be redirected to:

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/royal-london-360-i-dun-goofed/

External sites linking to this important thread are breaking, as are internal links eg

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/rl360-insurance/

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/rl360-zurich-international-generali-friends-provident-expats-beware/

This thread has already helped many people and the correct redirection will help many more going forward, especially as Pete himself has shown willingness to defend those who can't always defend themselves.

DavidAnnArbor

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #214 on: April 11, 2017, 06:03:32 AM »
When I read these stories I just want to cry.

JamesAt15

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #215 on: April 12, 2017, 11:47:28 PM »
I recently received a letter from Royal London explaining that they were increasing my account fee, and the last time they increased my fee was 2013. The letter says in bold text, "This shows the fee per month."  It then shows my fee for a Paid Up (i.e. I am not making contributions to it) account as increasing from about $170 to $175.

"Holy crap!" is my natural reaction.

I dug up the letter from 2013 and at that time they increased my monthly fee from about $12 to $14. That letter is the same format and also included the bold "This shows the fee per month." sentence.

Dividing the $170 fee by 12, I get the same value of about $14 they listed in 2013.

Well... I can only assume they mistakenly quoted me a yearly figure for my account fee instead of a monthly fee. And I am checking with them to make sure this is correct.  UPDATE: I received an email back from them that they did make a mistake on the letter and have already sent out correction and apology letters. I will be curious to see the postmark on the correction letter.

While it is perhaps a small mistake, I don't like the feeling (stemming from larger mistakes they have made with my account in the past) that they are not as fastidious as I would want from a group holding and managing a large amount of money for me.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2017, 08:03:08 PM by JamesAt15 »

quantum123

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #216 on: June 15, 2017, 11:54:30 PM »
An update on my case!

I am pretty ecstatic right now as I just received below email from my advisor. I have been very patient with him over the last 7 months and that now seems to be fruitful. Money is not back in my account yet but this is a huge step in the right direction :)

******
-Wednesday, 14 June 2017 at 15-03
Hi P
So....what did the suits at the round table have to say?


Date: Friday, 16 June 2017 at 12.53
Hi Niels

Well good news in that the ‘suits’ have agreed to return all of your money once we have paid back all the commission so no restructure is required! I would once again, ask for your patience Niels as this is going to take some time and I am waiting now for a written agreement from RL360 on this. I will also send you a written agreement between ourselves as this has to come out of my future commission earnings, not the company. It will take some time for me to pay that back to them I’m sure you understand (I do not take a salary form the company).

We can go into more detail on this once I get the written agreement from them but I am now working with someone at RL360 who is much more proactive than previously.

Again, thank for your patience and understanding and wish you a good weekend.

Regards
P



*********

 - A GREAT weekend to everyone!!!
« Last Edit: June 15, 2017, 11:59:15 PM by quantum123 »

Little Bird

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #217 on: June 28, 2017, 06:06:55 AM »
Same position as many others. Did not do a proper due diligence on this investment and considered it a safe bet to store some savings in. I am at month 37 with $1000 monthly contributions. My withdrawal amount is at approx $17,000 with an account balance of $41,000. I have attempted to use the templates provided within this post but still unsure if I have the inputs correct. Have been in touch with my advisor today who seems reluctant and at times ignorant of the RL360 structure, and continues to suggest that I come into the office for a chat. I don't blame him necessarily, but anyone with any financial sense should press for a full fee structure prior to signing to ensure that returns will at least be on par with a fund that can be accessed privately along with estimated re-balancing costs.

I found this site only as I figured this out on my own and asked this week to adjust my contribution down to the minimum. Would anyone still on the thread be able to clarify why paying the minimum for the remainder of the period is still a poor decision, in my case over withdrawing and forfeiting $24,000?

I still see my "advisor" socially and want to slap them each time I do...
Anyway, when I ran the spreadsheet, contributing the minimum each month after you've passed the initial allocation period will leave you paying a higher % of fees on a lower monthly deposit, essentially destroying any gains you'd made in the allocation period.
I lost $20k 2 months ago as I withdrew however I'm confident in the knowledge gained from reading this forum among others, by reinvesting smarter in mutual funds, going by the current trends, within 3 years I'll be where I was had I still been wasting my money with RL360.

vietnaminvestor

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #218 on: August 15, 2017, 07:13:30 AM »
I have a plan which i think is similar to this - it is through Devere Group in Vietnam. It is the Providence Life, Compass Savings.

10 year plan, 6 months in.
Monthly Payment is $800 a month
First 12 months are allocated for initial premiums and basically from my understanding are to cover fees for the 10 years.

Does this sound familiar? What questions should I be asking the advisor, i have a payment due in 4 days - any advice would be appreciated.

What is the worst case if we were to keep paying $800 for 10 years, not missing any payments? Thanks

MDM

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #219 on: August 15, 2017, 08:21:00 AM »
I have a plan which i think is similar to this - it is through Devere Group in Vietnam. It is the Providence Life, Compass Savings.
Does CompassTandC describe what you have?

If so, it is a "whole life insurance" policy. 

In general, insurance should be used for insurance, while investment account should be used for investing.

Also in general, whole life is much more expensive than term life insurance.

As for "What questions should I be asking the advisor?", one that comes to mind is "how much money would I get back if I cancelled today?"

quantum123

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #220 on: January 13, 2018, 02:51:04 AM »

JAYSLOL

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #221 on: January 14, 2018, 10:00:25 AM »
It IS possible!

I got my money back from RL360:
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/rl360-royal-london-360-i-got-my-money-back-d/


Congrats!  Reading about this company and their lawsuit with MMM was interesting.  I'd never trust a company that would have contracts to contribute money for 30 year timelines

DavidAnnArbor

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #222 on: January 14, 2018, 06:14:15 PM »
Just the name Royal London 360 sounds like an overhyped scam

JAYSLOL

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #223 on: January 14, 2018, 08:28:54 PM »
Just the name Royal London 360 sounds like an overhyped scam

Like Entertainment 720


itsnotashley

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #224 on: October 20, 2019, 07:10:18 AM »
I'm new to MMM...signed up as a result of RL360 research on reddit which landed me here.
I'm an expat living in Dubai and have a RL360 Quantum plan (capital redemption option); I just finished a year of putting $1630 per month into it and I have 21 years to go. My advisor makes 1% of policy value per year, which I thought was fair since it incentivizes him to put in the work. I've gone through many of the horror stories here, but they all seem relatively short-term (in which you do end up losing everything you've put in, a T&C that was explained to me when I signed on because I was thinking long-term). I'm wondering if there are any stories of people who have stuck it out for the long haul and what the outcomes were? I've also used danclarkie's google sheet from 2014 to calculate, but I am also wondering if any fund over time would have a different outcome to the growth scenarios in the sheet?
Alternatively, if anyone has pointers on investment accounts/funds that they've invested in for 5-10+ years and have had a better outcome.

Apologies if these questions have been asked and answered before; I may have missed them.

StockBeard

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #225 on: October 20, 2019, 09:11:21 PM »
This thread has the answers, but it's a complicated topic. Read again, run the spreadsheets again, etc... it might take some time, but eventually it will click.

Would love to help more, but I had to sign a legally binding agreement years ago which prevents me from being of much help (see: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/rl360-insurance/ for some details). Ultimately anyway the decision needs to come from you.

For expats it's tough to find good investment options. If you are looking around for alternatives to these offshore insurance policies, I suggest you read Andrew Hallam's "Global Expatriate Guide to Investing" (https://www.amazon.com/Global-Expatriates-Guide-Investing-Millionaire/dp/1119020980 - Not an affiliate link) for answers specific to your situation, and bogleheads's philosophy for the general idea: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_philosophy. Also everything on this site, of course, which has the general principles, but you will not find here that much information to put the general ideas in practice as an expat.

Kalergie

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #226 on: October 21, 2019, 12:05:08 AM »
I'm new to MMM...signed up as a result of RL360 research on reddit which landed me here.
I'm an expat living in Dubai and have a RL360 Quantum plan (capital redemption option); I just finished a year of putting $1630 per month into it and I have 21 years to go. My advisor makes 1% of policy value per year, which I thought was fair since it incentivizes him to put in the work. I've gone through many of the horror stories here, but they all seem relatively short-term (in which you do end up losing everything you've put in, a T&C that was explained to me when I signed on because I was thinking long-term). I'm wondering if there are any stories of people who have stuck it out for the long haul and what the outcomes were? I've also used danclarkie's google sheet from 2014 to calculate, but I am also wondering if any fund over time would have a different outcome to the growth scenarios in the sheet?
Alternatively, if anyone has pointers on investment accounts/funds that they've invested in for 5-10+ years and have had a better outcome.

Apologies if these questions have been asked and answered before; I may have missed them.

I suggest you also have a look here in the UAE Bogleheads FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SimplyFI/

arebelspy

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #227 on: October 21, 2019, 02:12:35 PM »
In a nutshell, the math over the long term is so bad, it's best to get out when you can, with a loss, than keep pouring money into the pit.

That's why people are taking the short term loss. So then they can invest their monthly savings into a better investment.
I am a former teacher who accumulated a bunch of real estate, retired at 29, spent some time traveling the world full time and am now settled with three kids.
If you want to know more about me, this Business Insider profile tells the story pretty well.
I (rarely) blog at AdventuringAlong.com. Check out the Now page to see what I'm up to currently.

centastic

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Re: Royal London 360 - I dun goofed
« Reply #228 on: January 05, 2020, 09:49:54 PM »
Just because the product is not illegal in Dubai doesn't mean it shouldn't be.

Your advisor isn't putting in any work. Sorry to be the one to break the fantasy.

Anyway, let us know how you go, what you decide to do.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!