Kurt K.

Heritage RESP funds (AKA Knowledge First Financial) employs or/and contracts salesmen who are involved in predatory sales practices. They prey new and uninformed parents into signing long term contracts that they would never be able to truly understand the consequences of and risks the families entire contributions and income on the fund due to technicalities.

For example, The sales staff charge significant sales charges, in my case over $2,000, with the promise of a 100% refund of these charges if the subscriber maintains strict rules such as: never missing a payment, always updating addresses, choosing specific scholarship options.

When the sales staff was in my home, and to this day with current communication with the sales representative, touting the aspect if your child goes to a 4 years anniversary they would receive 100% of the sales charges back. However, further investigation recently has shown that this is not the case. The only way you would ever actually get 100% of the sales charges back is if your child goes to a 4 year college/university utilizing a 4 year EAP withdrawal of 3 EAP payments. Of which are not distributed until the 2nd year. The real issue is listed on their own statements of account that shows the 100% refund of sales charges is a lie.

I quote "Sales charges are returned at a rate of up to 25%, up to 50%, or up to 100% depending on the scholarship option chosen at matruity. The example of sales charge refund is calculated using the 2019 actual refund amount under scholarship 3 [the so called 100% option] which was $15.88 per unit. In the future years, the amount may be less or more depending on the amount of funds available in the sales charge refund account. Actual results may vary...]" In the example given if my child was to go to the scholarship option 3, of which I was lead to believe I would receive 100% of the $2,004 of sales charges back, I would only receive $329. They cannot guarantee that full 100% of the sales charges can be refunded at the end of the maturity, which in my opinion is not what was promised and not what I believe was in the contract.

Now if I want to remove my funds out of Heritage RESP, it will cost me not only the so called 100% refundable sales charges, but ALL the income earned in the plan to date. None of these items were discussed in the meeting with the sales rep in 2013 when as new parents, were preyed upon by predatory sales tactics and pressured into signing something at the time we did not understand.

I do not have confidence in Heritage RESP to be able to live up to their 100% refundable promise and according to their prospectus, they loose over 20% of their clients to other plans, as I'm sure were because they were preyed upon as well.