Endowment - options?

All too common unfortunately. They take your payments, hand the salesman a commission, stick the rest in whatever instrument they fancy (or to be fair outline in the original sales literature), and 6 years in, it's all gone t*ts up.

You'd have to ask them - try googling for "second hand endowments" - but some are so crap they won't touch them. OTOH some sites will quote a ballpark figure online.

Yep, called making it paid up. You stop paying in and it pays out at the original maturity, but based only on what you paid in. The catch is usually that you may not get a terminal bonus if you do that.

If you carry on paying in, you're effectively saying that NU will provide a better return on your continuing 131 a month than any other investment vehicle would. Is that what you think?

You don't say how old you are but you are of course getting 79k of life cover. If you spend your dough elsewhere and you have dependents, you will have to to replace that. That said, life insurance isn't especially expensive.

Earlier this year I sold an NU endowment that I'd held for 12years. Can't recall exact figures, but surrender value was around 9k and quotes from traded endowment policy (TEP) companies were between 9k and 13k. Search google uk for these companies. But choose one that will buy the policy from you directly. Some only buy when they find a seller. So they give you a nice quote but you may not get this if the seller they find only pays a lower amount. So careful when comparing quotes. I used Beale Dobie in the end. They were good though the sale took a couple of months and I felt they could have chased up info from the NU a little more quickly. Would recommend though. Also... haggle on the quotes. If you have a higher quote most companies will increase their first and second offers. But again, make sure you are comparing apples for apples before you sign.

Si