Endowments - What are you doing with yours

[dizzydo]

A report in the Money Section of the Sunday Times yesterday said you would have been better putting your cash under the mattress. I am thinking about cashing ours in and buying something more lucrative. Anyone else considered this?

Don't you lose a big proportion if you cash them in? My BIL sold his on which meant he didn't get full value but got more than cashing in.
I am keeping mine till maturity

We cashed in and put it against the mortgage. I had looked at the statements and realised that we were paying a fortune for the life cover attached to the mortgage, and the investment was increasing very slowly. We were paying £50 a month (so £600 a year), and the annual charges were over £350! We've accelerated paying off our mortgage instead which has worked out much better.

I did look at selling rather than cashing in, but it didn't get us a better price.

Same as Ladymuck here.

Did you have a long time to go with your endowments? We have 3 on the go but the first will mature in a couple of years. It would seem daft to cash it in now

Ours had 10 years left to run. Wouldn't bother to cash in one with 2 years left to ruiun, but definitely 7 years plus I reckon.

We cashed ours in a few years ago. It was a unit-linked one so we didn't lose anything, and in fact we did quite well because we cashed it in after there had been a nice sustained period of growth.

We used it to reduce the mortgage, we then changed the whole mortgage to repayment and the money we used to pay for the endowment is now used to over-pay the mortgage.