Sun Life Life Insurance Reviews

I have a life insurance policy with this company for over 25 years. Four years ago I took out a loan against the policy. I made monthly payments to pay off the loan. It was paid off a year ago. One year later they sent me a statement saying that I was still owing over $800 in loan on the policy.
Disgusting, lying, stealing company. Don't trust this company. I am fearful that this company will steal money from my insurance when I die and my family will not know.

#1 SUN LIFE FINANCIAL INVESTMENTS; Pay attention to your investments! I learned the hard way. Sun Life has illegally been charging me a FRONT END FEE and a BACK end fee on my investments for over three years. They pull money in and out of investments just to increase their own fees they can collect. Then, when you attempt to move your funds to a different investment firm to conduct your own investments, they use DELAY TACTICS. All while your investment dwindles away to nothing. Highly frustrating and unprofessional. I requested my funds be moved over to my own financial institution that I deal with. It has been FOUR MONTHS. My bank has been fighting to get my money out of the greedy claws of Sun Life. I have been on the phone with them daily. It's supposed to take up to three weeks. Not four months. What a joke! #2 SUN LIFE INSURANCE; We asked Sun Life a simple question about their life insurance policies available at a local trade show. The lady at the trade show seemed nice enough... So we gave her our phone number. She said she would call us to answer our question later. She called us EVERY DAY for SIX MONTHS straight. Not exaggerating! We were ready to charge Sun Life with harassment as we asked them OVER and OVER again to stop calling. We even went into the office and told them we were not interested in their life insurance. There are better options out there for life insurance. They continued to harass us, attempting to use scare tactics to talk us into buying their insurance. #3 WORK-BASED BENEFITS PACKAGE; What an over-priced pile of garbage. Every company seems to make the switch over to Sun Life because they APPEAR to have lower rates. Then later find out that Sun Life actually doesn't have good coverage at all. Most of the claims that employees submit get declined or audited. Sun Life is extremely difficult to get ahold of and, if you do manage to get through to sometime, good luck understanding what they are mumbling over the phone... Other benefits packages (EG Great-West Life) offer much better packages and a painless online claim process that pays you within 72 hours. Even care suppliers will refuse to use "Direct Pay" if you have Sun Life because they are so terrible to deal with.

We bought insurance and financial products from Sun Life in 2010. Their subsequent communications are an ongoing Gong Show. Thousands of words, very few numbers, no transparency at all. Another example just came in: a letter informing us that “the monthly cost of insurance of $140.62 exceeded the fund value in your policy on Nov. 18, 2017, and a minimum payment of $75.27 is required.” We called our very experienced agent (again) to ask about it and got back 2 long emails full of details about our various accounts without clarifying anything at all. Some of the details were flat wrong. We called him again this morning and had to rein his complicated, jargon-loaded, often erroneous explanations in several times before he finally realized what the “fund value in your policy” meant and that the $75 payment was going to disappear anyway when we make our regular annual payment. Our agent pointed out that people commonly lose track of the complexities of their Sun Life policies and other accounts. Well, duh. I asked why, since the company is obviously aware of that fact, their communications are ALL so obtuse as to make their customers feel too stupid to follow what is happening with their investments? No answer. He also had no answer for why his calculations about this matter do not match those of the letter. Sun Life is a Gong Show as far as customer communications and transparency are concerned. The only reason we have not closed our accounts with Sun Life is because none of the 3 tiers of customer service we have contacted can tell us what it will cost us to do so. As far as they have been able to show us, our investments with them have paid less than 5% returns during one of the most profitable markets in the history of the world. We would not trust Sun Life to carry our lunch around the corner, and are chipping away at an escape hatch.

I had 2 life insurance policies (one company provided and an additional supplemental policy). I decided I no longer needed the supplemental policy and called mid-November to cancel it. I'd already had numerous problems with this company with billing issues on the company provided policy and had experienced months of run-around. I found the same problems in trying to cancel a policy. First of all, you have to wait forever to get thru to them on the phone. Then you are told you need to email your request, complaint, question, etc. to a generic email address. The emails go unanswered. Follow up phone calls get you nowhere. After 3 emails and a threat to complain to my state insurance board, I got a response that my request to cancel my policy was "under review!" I had prepaid for the quarter and called to cancel about 6 weeks into the quarter so expected a pro-rated refund but since they have to "review" my request, they have now dragged this out thru the quarter. Ridiculous! If I want to stop doing business with your company, what is there to "review"...it's not even a claim! And now I am getting the runaround again on the remaining policy I hold with them because I want to go from quarterly payments to monthly so that when I find another policy thru another company and cancel with Sun Life I dont' lose 2 months worth of payments! There is no way to change your policy payment schedule on their website, and a call, when I finally reached a representative resulted in being told to email my request. I flat-out told the rep I refuse to go thru the email run-around again and mailed them 1 months payment with a 7 page complaint letter, including all of my unanswered email threads from previous problems. Avoid this company. I realize from the poor way they treat customers that if my family had to file a claim on my life insurance, they would be treated the same way and face months of stone-walling and being ignored!

I had life insurance ,when i went to cancel it they told me after paying out of my own pocket i would not receive anything from paying into it for years. Most would get a refund but not these people they keep it.

You pay into a policy and then when you decide to take money out, it takes FOREVER. Should anyone have to suffer?

1. Submit the forms
2. Get the tax forms
3. Return the required forms
4. Wait -- several weeks!
5. Call their information number to find out about your check
6. Navigate through innumerable prompts
7. Service person says that there is ONLY one person who handles surrenders that involve the U.S.
8. Leave message for that person. (She is not there.)
9. Get return call from this person almost a day later. I am not in, so she leaves a message and tells me that she is about to leave for the day so will call you tomorrow.
10. Tomorrow NO call. (repeat steps 5 through 8)
11. Finally talk to right person. She has not even looked at the forms that were submitted.
12. Wait 10 days for check to be issued

Well, we hope that step 12 actually happens!

The person passed away before Sun life Insurance sent the payments to her. So according to the policy, they have to pay 30 times the monthly amount to the surviving spouse or, if there is no live spouse, to their single children under 21. Well, she had a spouse and Sun Life insurance only paid 6 times the monthly amount she was entitled to received. We are still going back and forth with them trying to make them pay

My retirement payment due date was April 1st, Now is July 11 and I still I didn’t get my first pension. What a shame! I’m behind with payments for my bills.

SunLife Canada's customer service was painfully slow, made no use of the Internet for communications and was frustratingly bureaucratic and impersonal.

To begin with, when I applied for term life, they started withdrawing a premium before the policy was even approved and before the date I requested to start the coverage. Whenever they notified me about my application, they sent it by Canada Post (regular mail) which always took a week or more to arrive and more than once they gave me incorrect information when I called their customer service line. I couldn't even look up the status of my policy online.

An abysmal experience for me. It just wasted my time and money, so I cancelled the policy. Then, after I cancelled it by registered mail with plenty of advance notice, they still withdrew a premium for the next month and literally took a month to refund it to me -- via a cheque in the mail, of course.