Zurich International Life New Vista Plan

Planning your future can be both exciting and daunting

You may want to ensure your children or grandchildren are well educated, arrange a wedding, take a career break, travel the world
or retire in style. All these things can be made possible if you plan and save for them.

Starting to save with Vista now, will help you afford these choices in the future.

Until recently, savings and retirement plans have traditionally offered a restrictive and inadequate package which was expensive to implement and complicated to arrange. Zurich Life International offers a real answer to the problems of finding a simple,
flexible savings and retirement benefits package.

Whether you are an expatriate (of any nationality) or an internationally minded person resident in your home country,
Vista offers you the possibility of a secure and prosperous retirement.

Vista presents you with the opportunity to decide exactly what you want, when you want it and at a level and type of protection
you feel is appropriate to your own particular circumstances.

This flexibility means that you can take Vista with you from employer to employer and country to country;
you can increase, decrease or even temporarily suspend your payments, as you decide best;
you can choose at what age you wish to draw benefits or retire.

In addition you can choose how you wish to receive your monies - tax free lump sums,
regular income payments or a combination of the two.

Enhanced and special Vista terms are available for larger contribution amounts that represent truly outstanding value.
Please click here to view these special terms.

How Vista Works

Vista has been designed to be a tax-efficient,simple, flexible, savings plan that can change as your circumstances change. Premiums can be single payments and regular payments which can be increased, decreased or even stopped for a while if necessary.

All your premium payments will be invested into a range of investment funds of your choice. You can choose from a wide selection, but if you prefer to have the choice selected for you, you can choose the automatic investment strategy. This is an investment option which automatically switches your investments from equity based funds to cash and bond based funds as your Vista moves closer to maturity..

For further information about the range of Investment Funds available, please refer to the Zurich Life International ‘Guide to Your Investments’ and the ‘Guide to Mirror Funds’ booklets which are available from CSM Ltd.

This guide will give answers to many of the questions you should be asking before you make your final investment decision. It also gives information on the fund and investment opportunities available through Zurich Life International.Detailed fund performance on the complete range of funds can be obtained by clicking here.

Why choose Vista?

Saving is all about discipline and habit. If you start saving with Vista today, your future plans could be closer than you think. Whether you are saving for retirement, to educate your children, to pay for a family wedding or just ‘in case’, Vista can help you make the most of your savings.

A Vista policy lets you decide:

• how long you want to save,
• how much and in which currency you want to save,
• how often you want to save,
• the funds in which you want to invest,
• the level and type of insurance protection you want.

Ownership

Your Vista can be issued in just your name or in joint names where you decide to save with another person. Vista can also be owned by trustees or a company.

Frequency

Regular savings can be made monthly, quarterly,half-yearly or yearly.

Term

The minimum term of the policy is five years.The minimum age at which you can take out a Vista is 18 years and the maximum of any life insured you elect for your policy is 74 years. The policy cannot extend beyond the owners 80th birthday. For a joint life case the policy is written on a first death basis.

Currency

You can make your payments in a choice of currencies including US dollars, pounds sterling, euros, Hong Kong dollars, Japanese yen, Swiss francs and Australian dollars.

Payments

Vista is designed to be flexible. You can increase or decrease your level of payments as your circumstances change, or you can invest lump sums into the policy at any time. You can also increase your savings automatically by choosing to ‘escalate’ your regular premiums by either 2.5% or 5% per year. This option helps offset the effects of inflation or link your savings to expected wage rises.If at any point after 18 months, you find that you can no longer continue to save regularly and need to take a break in saving, you can stop your savings for up to three years without penalty. You don’t even have to tell ZIL that you are taking a break, and you can resume saving at any time.For convenience, you can pay your premiums by direct debit or standing order. ZIL also accept premiums by cheque, telegraphic transfer or credit card. Credit card premiums are subject to a small charge per transaction.

Access to savings

You can take lump sum amounts from your Vista at any time after 18 months provided your savings have a surrender value. This is particularly useful if you are saving for your children’s education where you need to pay the fees each term or where you have reached your savings target for that luxury item that you have planned to buy.

Bonus

ZIL believe that long term regular savings should be rewarded. That’s why ZIL offer the bronze,silver and gold bonus scheme,which allows you to receive a savings bonus. And the more you save, the higher the bonus.For more information please click here.

Investment

Your savings are put into an account which is then invested in your chosen funds. ZIL's range of investment funds available on Vista allows you to match your investment strategy to your savings goals. You can also choose ZIL's automatic investment strategy, which switches your investment into lower risk funds over time, providing you with a risk management approach as your policy moves towards maturity. For more information please click here

Protection

A selection of protection benefits is also available with Vista, including death benefit, critical illness benefit and waiver of premium benefit. These insurance benefits are designed to help your family deal with the financial implications of your death, serious illness or injury. For more information please click here.

Why choose Zurich?

When you are choosing who you should place your money with, size and strength really do matter. Zurich is one of the largest financial services companies in the world, with over 62,000 employees and offices in approximately 50 countries.

With headquarters in the renowned financial centre of Zurich, Switzerland, the Zurich Financial Services Group, of which Zurich International Life are part, can trace its roots back more than 130 years. Over 35 million people trust ZIL to look after their investments, so with Zurich you can be sure your money is secure.

International experts

Zurich International Life was set up to deal specifically with business from all around the world. With offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia ZIL have local knowledge, backed by a global company.ZIL's head office is based in the Isle of Man, and as a self-governing British Crown Dependency, the Isle of Man offers you some important benefits.

Portability

Regardless of where you live, your Vista policy stays in the Isle of Man. This gives you the freedom to move around the world, without having to establish a new savings plan in each location.

Stability and security

The Isle of Man enjoys the stability of its own government and established its own Insurance Act in 1986. Since then it has become one of the world’s leading offshore life assurance centres. The Isle of Man Insurance Act ensures that international companies, like Zurich International Life, are well managed and financially sound. Local financial regulation ensures that the interests of all policy owners are specifically protected from the dealings of fraudulent insurance companies. This legislation is designed to protect all policy owners and operates globally. All Zurich International Life policies are protected by the Isle of Man Life Assurance (Compensation of Policyholders) Regulations 1991 if the company should be unable to meet its liabilities.

Confidentiality

You can also be sure that when legitimately investing with ZIL, ZIL will only ever provide details of your policy to you or CSM Ltd. The Isle of Man has data protection legislation (The Isle of Man Data Protection Act 2002) which ensures your details are not passed on to anyone else without your permission.

Tax-efficiency

With a Vista savings policy, your funds are not taxed at source, therefore your savings grow in a tax-efficient environment.

Choice and control with ZIL's comprehensive range of funds

Saving with Vista now can open up your choices for the future.But you’ll want to make sure your money is working hard from
the outset.

When deciding where to invest, you should carefully consider what you are expecting to achieve from your investment, how long you wish to invest for and the level of risk you are willing to take with your money.

ZIL's ‘Investments – Your guide’ brochure takes you through all these issues and provides full details of the Zurich International fund range. The funds you choose can be varied at any time to reflect changes to your circumstances, your attitude to risk, your time horizon or your personal expectations. With Vista, you can switch your existing fund holdings at any time and, at the present time, no cost.

You can also inform ZIL to redirect future premiums into an alternative fund or funds at any time. Let time make the decision for you Choosing and managing the right funds over the full term of your policy can be confusing. That’s why ZIL developed their automatic investment strategy.

This system will automatically switch your investments through a series of funds as you save. The automatic investment strategy has been designed to give you exposure to the stock market, where there is the highest potential for your investments to grow.

However, as the end of your policy draws near, the value is safeguarded against sudden investment volatility by switching your money into more stable, lower risk investments.

For example, if you take out a 20 year Vista,your money will initially be invested in the Adventurous fund, Performance fund and the Blue Chip fund in the proportions outlined below.

Your savings will stay in these funds for ten years and then be adjusted by switches to the Performance, Blue Chip, Cautious and Defensive funds in the proportions shown.

After five more years, they will be adjusted again, eventually ending up in the Defensive and Money Market funds when your policy ends. The automatic investment strategy is free of charge, and is available in US dollars, pounds sterling and euros. You may switch into the strategy at any point during the term of your policy.

Prepare for the unexpected

Saving for the future is an important step towards achieving your ambitions. No-one knows what the future holds and it’s possible that you or your family may have to deal with the financial consequences of death, a serious illness or accident.

To ease the financial burden, Vista offers a series of additional benefits if you die or suffer an injury that results in poor health. It makes sense to protect the things that are important to you and to preserve your savings. Vista’s three main benefits are death, critical illness and waiver of premium which are described below.

Where you have two lives insured, you are able to have the majority of benefits apply to each life insured. This means in most cases that benefits (except waiver of premium) are dependent on each life separately. In any event, the full investment value of your savings will be payable should you die before the policy ends.

Death benefit

If you choose to take this benefit, your family, or other beneficiaries, will receive a lump sum payment when you die. You choose the level of death benefit you want and whether you want the payment included in the value of your investments, or in addition to the value of your investments.A further explanation on this feature can be obtained by clicking here.

If you have a joint life policy, both of your lives may be insured and the benefit will be paid out on the death of the first person and the policy will cease.

Critical illness benefit

This benefit will be paid if you are diagnosed with one of the serious illnesses covered, for example, certain forms of cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. This benefit helps you at a time when you and your family may need extra funds to pay for expenses such as private nursing care. Death benefit must be selected if you also want critical illness benefit. If you have a joint life policy, both of your lives may be insured and the benefit will be paid out on the diagnosis of a critical illness. The payment of a claim under this benefit will reduce any associated death benefit by the value of the claim.

Waiver of premium

If you are diagnosed with an illness or suffer a disability that prevents you from working and earning an income, waiver of premium benefit will pay your Vista premiums for you, allowing your savings plan to continue. If you have chosen to escalate your premiums as well, the current premium will be covered by this benefit, not just your initial premium. Once you are fit to return to work this benefit will cease. The benefit is based on the life of the person who pays the premiums and therefore is only available to the first life insured on a joint life policy. For more information on the full range of benefits please click here.

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