Not me, the endowment policy I took out 24 years and 11 months ago when I bought my first house, a two-bed mid-terrace (what is nowadays termed a town house!) just outside Derby for the sum of £18,995. Hard to believe such house prices exsited, but back then they did; back then it was (just) possible for a single female graduate engineer to get a foot onto the base of the property ladder. Had I stayed in Derby, had I stayed in that house, next month I would have owned it outright. A strange thought! Back then 25 years seemed forever and 48, well, old.
Since I took out that policy there has been all the hooha about endowments, about how they couldn't meet their targets. Since then I moved, bought and sold another house (bought at £31,500, sold eleven years later at £40,500 having spent more than 10k on improving it in the meantime...) and now live, by the grace of God, in a beautiful manse, the price of which I am embarrassed to contemplate. In between I paid mortgage interest at about 18% - how many people have long forgotten that - and seen house prices rise and fall. A lot has happenned indeed.
What struck me though, was the final valuation I've been given... it would have comfortably covered my original mortgage, not with huge profits, but with enough to have a holiday or buy a new suite of furniture of somesuch. I was not wrongly sold a bad policy. Despite the fact that investments can go down and well as up, it always remained 'on target'. I am glad I retained this endowment, even though during the living by faith years of college it was hard to find the monthly premium. Glad not just because it means I have some money to reinvest for the future but glad because it vindicates the decision I took all those years ago as a far more naive person, just setting out into adulthood and being the first person in her family to own property, so without the experience of parents to draw on. Glad, too, because it shows that what I was told all those years ago was right - investments go up and down, interest rates go up and down, but with a long term investment things even out.
Scottish Equitable, the company with whom I had the policy no longer exists, having been taken over last year, but there's a nice kind of irony in that company name... who'd have guessed 25 years ago the girl buying her first house in the English midlands would see the policy mature as somone living in Scotland?
By the way, if anyone now thinks I'm wealthy, think again; I'm definitely not worth marrying or bumping off for my money!!