The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a non-profit that tracks the growth of this investing movement, estimated that more than $1.16 trillion was invested by impact investors in 2021, with a diverse range of investors. According to the Global Impact Investing Network, 2022 Report, almost two thirds of impact investors believe that they can eat their cake and have it too, expecting to earn as much or more than a risk-adjusted return, even as they do good. That delusion running deepest among pension funds, insurance companies.............. Read more

Locally, Insurance Companies that appear to be serious and well regulated also use a number of tricks to grossly underpay pension benefits in comparison to the amount originally promised and most of the time they get away because of the contract terms whereby it is usually stated that the benefit payable will depend on the growth of the fund. Insurance agents will show you a table with three scenarios, worst/average/best. They will lure the client by showing a table whereby even the worst case scenario appears not to be too bad!

Once you sign the contract, you are doomed because when the time comes for the payment of benefits, it will practically never fall within the average or best case scenario figures and the final amount proposed could be very low even when compared to the worst case figures, to the extent of being derogatory. The insurance company will use all sorts of arguments to prove itself right and lately, some have been using the 2008 financial crisis as the main reason for low performing assets into which the pension premium of the client had been invested as well as the low interest rates being paid on risk free deposits. The scam here is that they will never show you in detail how the benefit was calculated and will hide behind actuarial calculations which in themselves can be easily manipulated high and low to the whims and fancies of the actuaries who get paid by the insurance companies to do the calculations. We are not talking about small insurance companies here. We are talking about very highly regarded insurance companies that are categorized as public interest entities! If you are intelligent enough, you will surely have already identified one of the Insurance Companies of our country that resorts to such practices...

So, think not once or twice, but more than  ten times before you sign a pension contract with an insurance company, the terms of which will be flawed but you won't be able to detect and the scammers will surely get away by using these same terms.