Introduction
There are many Life Insurance Companies in India and they offer a number of Insurance Plans. One such plan that is on offer is the Pension Plan – also known as – Annuity Plan and many variants of the same are available in the Market. Whenever a person is given by too many choices, one thing that is bound to happen for sure is – Confusion. And with this confusion, the question that arises in everyone’s mind is which plan should I buy?
Under which Pension plan will you get your money back, which plan gives maximum pension with lowest premium and which annuity plan gives return of premium as an option? To simplify this confusion of yours, IRDAI via its circular dated 25 Jan 2021 has directed all Insurance companies to mandatorily launch a simplified, easy to understand Standard, Individual, Immediate Annuity plan called – Saral Pension Plan (Saral Pension Yojana).
What is Saral Pension Yojana?
It is a Standard, Individual, Immediate Annuity plan which when launched by any company, will have the company’s name prefixed. e.g. ICICI Saral Pension, PNB Metlife Saral Pension etc.
FEATURES
STANDARD – It means all companies will have to give the same features as part of this plan and they cannot customise it as per their choice and convenience.
INDIVIDUAL – This plan can only be taken only on Individual basis.
IMMEDIATE ANNUITY – Under this plan, the pension or the annuity will immediately start without any waiting or deferment period.
For e.g. If your age is 50 years and you have built your corpus amount and chose to invest in this scheme. As soon as you invest, you will start getting the income immediately as per the waiting period chosen by you.
OPTIONS UNDER THIS PLAN
- Life Annuity with 100% Return of Purchase Price
- Joint Life Annuity with provision of 100% Annuity for secondary annuitant on death of first annuitant and 100% Return of Purchase Price on death of Last Survivor
YOUTUBE Video
Watch the details of the plan via the video below.
Saral Pension Yojana or Saral Pension Plan is brainchild of IRDAI who vide its circular dated 25th January 2021 has asked all Life Insurance companies to mandatorily introduce as part of their offerings. This is a Standard, Immediate Annuity plan which aims at providing regular pension to the Annuitants.
Given the history of many disputes and confusions arising due to many different plans being offered leading to confusion of customers, this plan aims to given only 2 options as part of its offering.
The first option is
Life annuity with 100% Return of Purchase Price; and
Second Option is
Joint Life annuity with a provision of 100% annuity to the secondary annuitant on death of the primary annuitant and Return of 100% Purchase Price on death of last survivor.
We will cover the Death Benefit, Survival benefit, Maturity Benefit, Loan Applicability, Surrender conditions in this Video.
Circular of IRDAI can be seen by visiting the link – Circular (irdai.gov.in)