I am currently 31 years old, very new to investing. At 28 I opened a Whole Life 65 policy at Mass Mutual. I don’t have a very high income, but thought it wise to save at least a little for retirement so I’ve been contributing $100/month.
Since then I’ve become increasingly suspicious that I made the wrong choice. I have no dependents, and no prospects of any on the near horizon. My parents are wealthy and wouldn’t need the death benefit. Despite having wealthy parents, I prefer to be completely financially independent from them — although Christmas is always nice! Because of this, I feel the life insurance aspect is totally a non-value for me.
Whenever I raised my concerns to my Mass Mutual advisor, I always left feeling confused and overwhelmed, and ended up neither cancelling the policy nor doing much independent research into it… until now.
After finally doing my own research over the past two months (much thanks to r/personalfinance and r/investing), last week I decided to bite the bullet and open a Roth IRA at Betterment, with the same $100/month contribution. I now have both the Whole Life policy and the Roth IRA.
This week I informed my Mass Mutual advisor that I planned to cut my losses, cancel my Whole Life policy and take the surrender cash (about $875). I felt pretty confident going into the meeting, but was presented with counter-argument that made me second-guess myself again. The arguments seemed to mostly be along these lines:
- I am too inexperienced in investing to make a decision based on my own research and should respect the opinion of an experienced advisor
- I am being naive and only finding negative opinions about Whole Life due to my own confirmation bias
- Whole Life is significantly lower-risk than Roth IRA and, if anything, I should keep both accounts in order to “diversify”
- The Roth IRA numbers I provided were “unrealistically high” and Betterment “must be showing you 15% returns or something”
So here I sit on a Saturday morning, still with both accounts open. I decided to sit down and make this spreadsheet outlining all my options. Here are some notes on this table:
- The numbers in the “Whole Life” column are the actual exact numbers given to me by my advisor in my most recent illustration, except the Annual Rate of Return, which is something they don’t provide of course, and I had to calculate backwards from Value at 65.
- The Mass Mutual illustration showed me with a $23,885 remainder at age 91. Not sure why they wouldn’t average that out into the monthly withdrawals, but that’s why the Total Value at 91 number is what it is.
- The numbers in the “Roth IRA” columns are all calculations I made using online calculators. The 8.5% is approximately what Betterment shows me as my estimated earnings based on average market performance.
Now that I have these numbers in front of me, I feel it is extremely damning of Whole Life. I would like to bring this in to our next (and hopefully last) meeting.
Please critique this table for me, and tell me if I am wrong anywhere. I don’t want to feel that I am about to make another bad decision by cancelling Whole Life, as the advisor insists. I really appreciate second and third opinions on this matter!
tl;dr I made a chart comparing my current Whole Life and Roth IRA accounts and want you to tell me where I got it wrong before I embarrass myself
EDIT: Revised the chart to show the split rate of return pre- and post-65 that Mass Mutual provided me. How do they even come up with these numbers?
Submitted January 07, 2017 at 09:44AM by quadra800 http://ift.tt/2jeME0H
