Financial service providers that offer retirement annuity (RA) products often do not speak of the benefits of having a premium holiday. The reasons for this are obvious – a loss in protected growth of your investment as well as income for the company.
However, what do you do when something unexpected happens or a life event forces you to look at your finances? Having extra cash on hand at after the debit orders go off your account can go a long way to improve your day-to-day living.
Liberty Life
Liberty offers the option to take up to 6 months in premium holidays in one request. This is done by sending a query to their customer service email address with your policy particulars.
The catch is – you have to contact them again before 6 months have lapsed in order to reinstate your policy otherwise you will pay penalties and the policy will be viewed to be in arrears.
Premium holidays are only available every 5 years and only twice in a policy’s lifetime.
The other trade-off is that the outcome value of your projected policy will be affected, as the capital will grow at a slower rate, having less money to grow the investment.
An authorisation form has to be dated and signed and emailed back to Liberty Life to complete the process.
Momentum
I found the email address on the Momentum website and emailed them for my particular product. Within 30 minutes there was a response seeking some clarity.
Similar to Liberty, the policy also has two payment holidays available in total. The maximum duration of a single payment holiday is two months. If the client only takes a single month payment holiday, they will forfeit the second month, so it is advisable to take them both.
No forms were needed to be signed or dated, the request was completed via email. The policy will automatically reinstate after the two month period.
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