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Enjoy the sunny side of old age: Younger people find it increasingly difficult to provide for it
Photo: Winfried Rothermel / imago images
In times of low interest rates, business with life and annuity insurance contracts is less and less worthwhile - both for customers and for insurers.
In the future, consumers who in the past have often covered a large part of their private retirement provision with such policies will receive an even significantly lower guaranteed interest rate when they take out new life insurance policies.
From January 1, 2022, insurers may promise a maximum annual interest rate of 0.25 percent for new contracts.
The corresponding change was published in the Federal Law Gazette.
Until now, the guaranteed interest rate - also known as the maximum technical interest rate - was 0.9 percent.
The guaranteed interest limits the interest promise that the insurer can make over the entire term of the contract.
A lower guaranteed interest rate puts the providers of Riester pensions in a predicament because they also have to ensure that their customers get back at least the contributions they have made and the state allowances at the end of the term.
"De facto funeral of the Riester pension"
In the case of other contracts, Germany's largest life insurer, for example, announced in the autumn with Allianz that it would no longer guarantee 100% receipt of the premiums paid.
They only want to sell contracts for which only 60, 80 or 90 percent are guaranteed at the end of the savings phase.
Due to the now lower guaranteed interest rate, insurers also fear for the future of the Riester pension.
"Many Riester providers will withdraw from the market from 2022," warned the chief executive of the GDV insurers' association, Jörg Asmussen.
The providers concerned could no longer guarantee the 100 percent premium receipt required by the legislator under the new maximum technical interest rate.
"That leads to a de facto funeral of the Riester pension."
Asmussen appealed to politicians to lower the contribution guarantee in a partial reform before the federal election.
But that would make the government-sponsored contracts less attractive for consumers.
The federal government was unable to agree on a comprehensive reform of old-age provision.
Private pension with contribution guarantee is becoming obsolete
If they are only allowed to calculate with an annual interest rate of 0.25 percent, it is difficult for the insurers to cover their costs, which amount to up to ten percent of the premiums, until the contract expires.
In life insurance, many companies now only offer policies without long-term interest guarantees and with limited premium guarantees for new business.
Of the 47 companies last examined in a study, only 16 had any classic private pension insurance contracts with a lifelong guaranteed interest rate of 0.9 percent in new business - a year ago there were 24 companies.
Since 2017, life insurers in Germany have only been allowed to offer contracts with a so-called guaranteed interest rate of a maximum of 0.9 percent.
The maximum actuarial interest rate is intended to prevent insurance companies with guarantee promises for life insurance and other pension products from taking over.
You can offer new customers less, but not more.
The maximum rate has continued to fall since the turn of the millennium.
apr / Reuters / dpa
