SunLife Investment
 

Has anyone invest in Sun Life Financial?

How reliable are they?

my investments are with sun life.

what do you mean by reliable?

A company I used to work for used to do employee retirement fund program with them. It was something like half equity, half fixed rate but you could tune the model to your preference. They report you with periodic reports so you could always pull out if you weren't satisfied with the progress.

I spend some time training advisors at Sunlife a few years back.

First, investing in sunlife could be 4 different ways.

1) Buying their stock on the exchange
2) Having an investment portfolio with Sunlife through an advisor (third party or in house)
3) Having group benefits/retirement pension through Sunlife
4) Having an investment in their insurance participating pool

1) As far as a company, they're a very solid firm. They've been around for over 100+ years. Insurance companies have taken a beating over the last few years due to low interest rates.

Canadian legislation states that insurance companies must invest a specific % of assets into government and AAA bonds. The problem with this is the 30 year bond rates are very very low and have been for a while now. As well, most insurance companies have up to a 400% up front cost initially to underwrite insurance policies, it's been difficult for these companies to turn over the same profits as they had in the past.

The company itself is rock solid but buying a stock is still going to be subject to a lot of the market conditions we are being faced with.

2)If you have investments with a Sunlife Advisor, that is a discussion to have with them. Seasoned advisors at sunlife can sell the same products as any other advisor so while you may have a sunlife advisor, you could be in a RBC Global Asset Management fund, or a Dynamic small cap business fund. The solidness of the investment would really have more to do with the advisors picks along with the money managers that are looking after the funds. Sunlife is in the process of launching their own mutual fund program and currently use CI for the bulk of their wealth management.

3)As for the investments they have within their group benefits plan through employers. You will likely be in a CI fund of some kind. They usually give you a choice of a few different asset mixes (typically based on risk) and the fund will move along as it would any other mutual fund.

4) Participating accounts would be insurance policies that have permanent and pre-determined cash values (not universal life policies). They run off a model that is far too different and complex to get into on this forum. Investing in those for the long term are great tools but usually require a very distant time horizon (20 years+). In the past, I had used these pretty much with CA firms that were looking at doing estate bypass tax for private corporations. Average people can use them too though.