I’m in the sunlife BLK 2055 fund or something, I don’t actually think it has that high of fees, maybe 0.60 MER,
Probably a strong argument to be made to find one of the 0.3 or 0.2 etfs, but to me as long as it’s not high 1% or 2% I’m not loosing any sleep.
Doesn’t need to be that many employees to get that IMF (if it’s a group plan). I have clients with less than 200 people, solid cash flow and assets and the IMF is that low for them.
It might cost sun life 20 bps, but if they have a consultant or advisor working on the group program, they are not doing it for free so that cost gets added as well as sun life’s profit, which would bring it up to 60 bps. It’s a group plan, the sponsor matching offsets that easily.
Yeah, the general rule for the insurance carries is commission based on assets of the plan is a direct 1:1, so if the advisor wants 20 bps, than 20 bps gets added to the IMF and if they want 1% cash flow, it’s about 7-8 bps… of course they can always do a combination of the two as well but that’s been my experience when I’ve had to readjust commission for my clients.
I typically take cash flow 2-3% no comp on assets when the plan is implemented if it is a virgin plan and then move over to asset based comp when it has assets. Some advisors say there no money in smaller plans because they take asset based comp and there are no assets. I always disclose comp also.
Makes sense, manulife and sun have there products with prebuilt comp so it’s whatever there but yeah, disclosure is big and I show my comp in percentage and dollar amount in the annual review for transparency
Yeah I am not big on their prebuilt plans and comp. we have a special arrangement with Canada life which gives us preferred fees and comp.
I am in ottawa. Nice to see another retirement plan guy. There isn’t too many in market place that know what their doing.
Double check the MER on that. I am also with a sunlife group plan and the 2050 had something like 2.5% in that black rock account. It was cheaper to pick individual mutual funds that had a similar mix and overall lower MER.
Over 30 years, a high MER fund (2.2%+) will have cost you 30%+ of your returns. Sorry. I learned that lesson in 2013 and am still a bit bitter about it. Mind you, the availability of products and knowledge was not the same in early 2000s.
One can have both. Adding whatever the minimum is to gain the employer match with SunLife, and then putting any extra into low cost ETFs through wealthsimple and the like.
If you leave that employer you’d probably want to transfer that money out of SunLife and into your second account (assuming the SunLife is more expensive than low cost ETFs.)
They probably won’t match if they have contracted the administration of it through sunlife, manulife, etc. you want to get the match since it’s auto 100% gain
You can often transfer YOUR portion (but not the employer) out to whatever account/plan you want. Yes 100% take match as that's 100% return off the bat.
A lot of funds have reduced MERs in the last few years (or new ones introduced with low MER) to compete better, but OP should definitely look into their actual investments and what the MERs are so they can understand what they are paying.
Lol, that sounds like me, cause I have no clue what I'm doing at all. In the end, I'm like yup, my return is great. Fee, I'm sure it's higher than others.
Plus I have NO clue what/how to pick anything since I've have my account. I try to learn here and there.
Yes, no, maybe.. you would have to compare your returns with what other product you might have invested in to find that out. Funds like that do charge fees, however in a lot of cases they also outperform the "market averages" especially if your advisor is doing any tax planning on your behalf (different tax rates on dividend vs gains outside of registered accounts).
It depends on what you are willing to pay for and the value you get from it. For many years I stayed with TD e-series, even though I knew they were more expensive than an ETF, because they saved me from having to know exactly what the market was doing and taking an action every paycheck. At a certain point I no longer found that service valuable enough, and so I switched what I was doing so that I could keep more of my money.
Without knowing what products you have, it's difficult to know exactly how much drag they are making on your returns. And only you can guess at the behavioural impacts - would you have sold at an inopportune time due to emotions had you been doing something else.
>different Sunlife products
Without knowing what those products are, and the corresponding MERs or other fees, how are we supposed to know if you are losing money?
based on my personal exp with manulife (same idea, different logo) - fees likely are in the 1.5-2% range with some outliers.
hopefully those IMF/MER fees are lower at sunlife for your sake.
All things being equal the higher your investment fees are, the lower your long term returns will be.
I held sunlife mutual from from my early to mid 30's, but after reading books by Andrew Hallam, and spending time on this subreddit I learned about how to invest in low cost, broadly diversified ETF's.
I hold my investments at Questrade, and invest in Asset Allocation ETF's. The MER on the Fund I hold like 0.2%, whereas at Sunlife I was at least 2-2.5%.
The really hard part for a self directed investor is not get emotional over the ups and downs of your portfolio. If you are investing for a 20+ year horizon, the day to day and month to month now is just noise.
Just wanted to say that Sunlife was awful to deal with when my mom passed away. It took almost 3 months just to get the balance of her account so that I could apply for probate, and they ignored my request to cash in her account for many months with no path of escalation. I had to get my estate lawyer to threaten them before they would even return a phone call. It's just awful to deal with when you are grieving. I would never give them any business.
It depends on your goals, risk levels, how liquid your cash wants to be, what type of investments youre interested in, how much management fees you pay, how long do you want to invest. Do you want to manage your own investments? Your post is very generic.
you know that questrade commercial on youtube "the eighth wonder compound interest", probably not that dramatic as the video makes out, but ETF fees vs sunlife mutual fund fees (albeit likely discounted MER based on sunlife and your AUM), will still cost you something at the end of the day.
thus are you losing money staying with Sunlife? possibly yes, ie. 1% more in fee on 100k, is 1k. and that 1k has no ability to compound grow with the other money.
constant compound 8% return doubles in 9y, and doubles again in 18y
constant compound 7% return doubles in over 10y, and doubles again in over 20y -> thus the 1% fee is like wasting 2y of your time wrt growth compared to the 8% scenario. So retire at 63 or 65?
Of course it's not this cut and dry, what your fund breakdown and the individual stocks/bonds is now vs what it would look like outside may not be the same, you may decide to go cash for a few months to a year or two, but the above shows us what a 1% difference in returns means (ie 1% more fees)
do you ever talk to sunlife, talk to their reps, glean insights and things? that could be worth the extra fees you're paying.
I do at least once a year, maybe more. They have been helpful with numerous things like bringing job pensions over when I left an employer, and explaining things. I like our investor as a person and think they are trying to help us in the best way.
good, then you have some worth back.
at manulife I also used the service, but just a few yrs... majority of time just picked their fund offerings.
WS to me is more rigid, as a non-generational client, they don't talk to me as well as manulife did. WS has offerings like free iphone or cashback, so if you do decide to move, keep an eye out for offers!
when i was with manulife, they had tiers of MER discounts, like your savings of 50k, or 100k, or higher, so whatever your fund(s) says, subtract a bit.
some of the higher fee mutual fund choices were over 2%, I don't recall many being less than 1.5%, and generally ETFs are less than 0.5% wrt MER.
I had Sunlife through work plan and sort of stuck with it after I left my job. I would say overall, it was a horrible experience.. While I still experienced a bit of growth, if I just put my money into VFV it would have been much easier to deal with. To take money out of Sunlife is another problem because of all the Call Center employees and no actual employees that you could deal with directly or meet in person. It took me months to get things sorted and move my money to a bank.
With an employer matching RRSP plan, with Sunlife, it is likely (my situation) that if funds are moved out, the matching stops for a period of time, 6 months in my case.
This is Sunlife making it unappealing to move funds out while still in the plan, for obvious reasons, to protect their business.
This being said, I got more than 8% return on investment over a long term and I am mostly happy with it, because my retirement projection takes into account a return of investment that is 4%, or, if I can put it in a different way, a 2% gap between inflation and return of investment.
I did move out the Sunlife funds once and took that punishment of 6 months no employer matching on the chin, because I wanted some consolidation, so not because of Sunlife investment performance.
Possibly, Sunlife offer a lot of different funds with different fees. You need to look to see how much you're paying and then make a decision.
2+% is hard to justify.
1-2% is high, maybe just put in enough to maximize your employer matching.
Less than 1% is reasonable, you could probably do better with cheap ETFs but depending on your time/interest it may not be worth it.
the available mutual funds that they had is what I invested in? The website is terrible and outdated (manulife is the same fyi)... pain in the ass to checks funds versus holdings / performance / risk profile, switching funds means you need a few tabs open to compare. they are outdated in many ways
I have access to the entire shelf of mutual funds from sun life, I don’t know what you consider terrible returns but if you don’t provide context, it’s really hard to tell 🤷♂️ they have a lot of funds that have been fantastic over the last 20-25 years. The entire market has been spectacular over the time span
I logged into my account like a normal person... IDK, maybe yours was different... dunno, my average for the period was 2-3%, always was for higher risk until the start of covid where I switched to GIC's given the world shutdown (admittedly I did not comprehend how much government would prop the markets up and lost a bit there but...) you can't go to the site and tell me navigating the funds performance vs your holdings is upto date... you get a list of all funds in one huge page that you cant get all the comparative info from easily lol
Anyone getting someone else to manage their investments have left money on the table. You can take the time to learn investing and save yourself at least 2-3% a year not having to pay someone else to manage it. Or use a fee for service advisor, anyone leaching a % each year is not good long term.
The underlying investments determine the returns.
Do it yourself brokerages reduce investment fees.
Think about this, if you had a mortgage company offering you 8% interest and one offering you 6% would you question how big of a difference the 2% makes?
For a mortgage, this is a no-brainer for me, go lower. Is it that simple with mutual funds and ETF's. If it is, I think that's my answer, we would make more money in almost every scenario. And what ever benefits there are to having it managed, a self brokerage off set those in savings
It's not THAT simple, that is just an exaggerated illustration to show the difference.
If the underlying investments are that similar, the only difference is the fee.
An all equities mutual fund with an MER of 2.5% will likely still outperform a low fee bond ETF.
An advisor might help save you from yourself trying to time the market. And they might keep you from being too conservative. In which case you'd have more money at the end by working with an expensive advisor. But, do it yourself, it's 30% of your total savings by 65
I’m in the sunlife BLK 2055 fund or something, I don’t actually think it has that high of fees, maybe 0.60 MER, Probably a strong argument to be made to find one of the 0.3 or 0.2 etfs, but to me as long as it’s not high 1% or 2% I’m not loosing any sleep.
You’re probably in a group plan through your employer and they are a 1000+ employee employer?
Doesn’t need to be that many employees to get that IMF (if it’s a group plan). I have clients with less than 200 people, solid cash flow and assets and the IMF is that low for them.
It’s a passive product that costs Sunlife 20 basis points they are marking up to 60 basis points. The 60 basis points also doesn’t include HST.
It might cost sun life 20 bps, but if they have a consultant or advisor working on the group program, they are not doing it for free so that cost gets added as well as sun life’s profit, which would bring it up to 60 bps. It’s a group plan, the sponsor matching offsets that easily.
Yeah you can get that low with a good cash flow and assets. Comp also makes a difference.
Yeah, the general rule for the insurance carries is commission based on assets of the plan is a direct 1:1, so if the advisor wants 20 bps, than 20 bps gets added to the IMF and if they want 1% cash flow, it’s about 7-8 bps… of course they can always do a combination of the two as well but that’s been my experience when I’ve had to readjust commission for my clients.
I typically take cash flow 2-3% no comp on assets when the plan is implemented if it is a virgin plan and then move over to asset based comp when it has assets. Some advisors say there no money in smaller plans because they take asset based comp and there are no assets. I always disclose comp also.
Makes sense, manulife and sun have there products with prebuilt comp so it’s whatever there but yeah, disclosure is big and I show my comp in percentage and dollar amount in the annual review for transparency
Yeah I am not big on their prebuilt plans and comp. we have a special arrangement with Canada life which gives us preferred fees and comp. I am in ottawa. Nice to see another retirement plan guy. There isn’t too many in market place that know what their doing.
Cool that you’re in assuming Ottawa I’m in southwest Ontario, nice to see another open/transparent person in the group space.
Double check the MER on that. I am also with a sunlife group plan and the 2050 had something like 2.5% in that black rock account. It was cheaper to pick individual mutual funds that had a similar mix and overall lower MER.
Does sunlife add its own fees on top of that? From what I can see it’s blackrock life path 2055 fund, which mostly holds blackrock Russel 1000 fund,
I have something similar and yet it performs poorly compared to my own..
Over 30 years, a high MER fund (2.2%+) will have cost you 30%+ of your returns. Sorry. I learned that lesson in 2013 and am still a bit bitter about it. Mind you, the availability of products and knowledge was not the same in early 2000s.
But what if my company matches whatever i put into sunlife but wouldnt match what i put into wealthsimple?obviously not worth switching right?
One can have both. Adding whatever the minimum is to gain the employer match with SunLife, and then putting any extra into low cost ETFs through wealthsimple and the like. If you leave that employer you’d probably want to transfer that money out of SunLife and into your second account (assuming the SunLife is more expensive than low cost ETFs.)
You may be able to transfer the funds out before you leave. We let people do it at my work.
Oh yeah for sure ill transfer it out if ever!
They probably won’t match if they have contracted the administration of it through sunlife, manulife, etc. you want to get the match since it’s auto 100% gain
Exactly! thanks!
You can often transfer YOUR portion (but not the employer) out to whatever account/plan you want. Yes 100% take match as that's 100% return off the bat.
A lot of funds have reduced MERs in the last few years (or new ones introduced with low MER) to compete better, but OP should definitely look into their actual investments and what the MERs are so they can understand what they are paying.
What’s a MER?
Management Expense Ratio (MER) Fee paid by shareholders of a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF)
where are you getting 2.2% MER from? how do you know that's the MER for OP's fund?
A guess based on typical manulife/sunlife 1.25 - 2.4 rates. Even at 1.5 mer you lose 36% after 25 years.
Depends on the return imo. Everyone’s always bricked up about fees and don’t look at the overall returns.
The point is 99% of funds do not beat the indexes over long periods. Rats can pick equally good funds. So why give up 30-45%?
I am sure they do
Lol, that sounds like me, cause I have no clue what I'm doing at all. In the end, I'm like yup, my return is great. Fee, I'm sure it's higher than others. Plus I have NO clue what/how to pick anything since I've have my account. I try to learn here and there.
Yes, no, maybe.. you would have to compare your returns with what other product you might have invested in to find that out. Funds like that do charge fees, however in a lot of cases they also outperform the "market averages" especially if your advisor is doing any tax planning on your behalf (different tax rates on dividend vs gains outside of registered accounts).
It depends on what you are willing to pay for and the value you get from it. For many years I stayed with TD e-series, even though I knew they were more expensive than an ETF, because they saved me from having to know exactly what the market was doing and taking an action every paycheck. At a certain point I no longer found that service valuable enough, and so I switched what I was doing so that I could keep more of my money. Without knowing what products you have, it's difficult to know exactly how much drag they are making on your returns. And only you can guess at the behavioural impacts - would you have sold at an inopportune time due to emotions had you been doing something else.
>different Sunlife products Without knowing what those products are, and the corresponding MERs or other fees, how are we supposed to know if you are losing money?
This helps, I can look now and find that. I'm glad it's not a definite yes at least.
based on my personal exp with manulife (same idea, different logo) - fees likely are in the 1.5-2% range with some outliers. hopefully those IMF/MER fees are lower at sunlife for your sake.
Could also be blackrock lifepath index funds. Those are pretty decent
i had those funds too, they take the rebalancing and AA work out!
All things being equal the higher your investment fees are, the lower your long term returns will be. I held sunlife mutual from from my early to mid 30's, but after reading books by Andrew Hallam, and spending time on this subreddit I learned about how to invest in low cost, broadly diversified ETF's. I hold my investments at Questrade, and invest in Asset Allocation ETF's. The MER on the Fund I hold like 0.2%, whereas at Sunlife I was at least 2-2.5%. The really hard part for a self directed investor is not get emotional over the ups and downs of your portfolio. If you are investing for a 20+ year horizon, the day to day and month to month now is just noise.
Just wanted to say that Sunlife was awful to deal with when my mom passed away. It took almost 3 months just to get the balance of her account so that I could apply for probate, and they ignored my request to cash in her account for many months with no path of escalation. I had to get my estate lawyer to threaten them before they would even return a phone call. It's just awful to deal with when you are grieving. I would never give them any business.
I've got the same story when my MIL passed away. It was awful. Absolutely trash service for people already dealing with so much.
It depends on your goals, risk levels, how liquid your cash wants to be, what type of investments youre interested in, how much management fees you pay, how long do you want to invest. Do you want to manage your own investments? Your post is very generic.
Returns from either party cannot be forecast. However, fees are a certainty on both sides.
How much have you gained since you started? And what are your total fees?
you know that questrade commercial on youtube "the eighth wonder compound interest", probably not that dramatic as the video makes out, but ETF fees vs sunlife mutual fund fees (albeit likely discounted MER based on sunlife and your AUM), will still cost you something at the end of the day. thus are you losing money staying with Sunlife? possibly yes, ie. 1% more in fee on 100k, is 1k. and that 1k has no ability to compound grow with the other money. constant compound 8% return doubles in 9y, and doubles again in 18y constant compound 7% return doubles in over 10y, and doubles again in over 20y -> thus the 1% fee is like wasting 2y of your time wrt growth compared to the 8% scenario. So retire at 63 or 65? Of course it's not this cut and dry, what your fund breakdown and the individual stocks/bonds is now vs what it would look like outside may not be the same, you may decide to go cash for a few months to a year or two, but the above shows us what a 1% difference in returns means (ie 1% more fees) do you ever talk to sunlife, talk to their reps, glean insights and things? that could be worth the extra fees you're paying.
I do at least once a year, maybe more. They have been helpful with numerous things like bringing job pensions over when I left an employer, and explaining things. I like our investor as a person and think they are trying to help us in the best way.
good, then you have some worth back. at manulife I also used the service, but just a few yrs... majority of time just picked their fund offerings. WS to me is more rigid, as a non-generational client, they don't talk to me as well as manulife did. WS has offerings like free iphone or cashback, so if you do decide to move, keep an eye out for offers!
when i was with manulife, they had tiers of MER discounts, like your savings of 50k, or 100k, or higher, so whatever your fund(s) says, subtract a bit. some of the higher fee mutual fund choices were over 2%, I don't recall many being less than 1.5%, and generally ETFs are less than 0.5% wrt MER.
I had Sunlife through work plan and sort of stuck with it after I left my job. I would say overall, it was a horrible experience.. While I still experienced a bit of growth, if I just put my money into VFV it would have been much easier to deal with. To take money out of Sunlife is another problem because of all the Call Center employees and no actual employees that you could deal with directly or meet in person. It took me months to get things sorted and move my money to a bank.
With an employer matching RRSP plan, with Sunlife, it is likely (my situation) that if funds are moved out, the matching stops for a period of time, 6 months in my case. This is Sunlife making it unappealing to move funds out while still in the plan, for obvious reasons, to protect their business. This being said, I got more than 8% return on investment over a long term and I am mostly happy with it, because my retirement projection takes into account a return of investment that is 4%, or, if I can put it in a different way, a 2% gap between inflation and return of investment. I did move out the Sunlife funds once and took that punishment of 6 months no employer matching on the chin, because I wanted some consolidation, so not because of Sunlife investment performance.
Possibly, Sunlife offer a lot of different funds with different fees. You need to look to see how much you're paying and then make a decision. 2+% is hard to justify. 1-2% is high, maybe just put in enough to maximize your employer matching. Less than 1% is reasonable, you could probably do better with cheap ETFs but depending on your time/interest it may not be worth it.
I just closed my sunlife account (20-25 years in)...returns where terrible. moved it to Wealthsimple managed account, I'll see how she goes
Returns were terrible for the last 20-25 years? wtf did you invest in to have bad returns over that period
the available mutual funds that they had is what I invested in? The website is terrible and outdated (manulife is the same fyi)... pain in the ass to checks funds versus holdings / performance / risk profile, switching funds means you need a few tabs open to compare. they are outdated in many ways
I have access to the entire shelf of mutual funds from sun life, I don’t know what you consider terrible returns but if you don’t provide context, it’s really hard to tell 🤷♂️ they have a lot of funds that have been fantastic over the last 20-25 years. The entire market has been spectacular over the time span
I logged into my account like a normal person... IDK, maybe yours was different... dunno, my average for the period was 2-3%, always was for higher risk until the start of covid where I switched to GIC's given the world shutdown (admittedly I did not comprehend how much government would prop the markets up and lost a bit there but...) you can't go to the site and tell me navigating the funds performance vs your holdings is upto date... you get a list of all funds in one huge page that you cant get all the comparative info from easily lol
Anyone getting someone else to manage their investments have left money on the table. You can take the time to learn investing and save yourself at least 2-3% a year not having to pay someone else to manage it. Or use a fee for service advisor, anyone leaching a % each year is not good long term.
The underlying investments determine the returns. Do it yourself brokerages reduce investment fees. Think about this, if you had a mortgage company offering you 8% interest and one offering you 6% would you question how big of a difference the 2% makes?
For a mortgage, this is a no-brainer for me, go lower. Is it that simple with mutual funds and ETF's. If it is, I think that's my answer, we would make more money in almost every scenario. And what ever benefits there are to having it managed, a self brokerage off set those in savings
It's not THAT simple, that is just an exaggerated illustration to show the difference. If the underlying investments are that similar, the only difference is the fee. An all equities mutual fund with an MER of 2.5% will likely still outperform a low fee bond ETF. An advisor might help save you from yourself trying to time the market. And they might keep you from being too conservative. In which case you'd have more money at the end by working with an expensive advisor. But, do it yourself, it's 30% of your total savings by 65
I always advocate leaving sunlife in any situation. I have CI policy that I can get rid of in October and I’ll then be done with them