I created this forum, because I had a very negative experience with CEFI. I lost app. 1600.00 Dollars due to bad advice and very poor Fund management from CEFI personnel. I would like for people to share their experience with CEFI in this forum so it will become a platform for everyone to use.  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2007-10-03 15:05:15 --

Let me guess. You withdrew from the group plan where you had 8 units?

I'm about to lose $2,000 if I withdraw from the plan.

I told CEFI I would set up a web site offering my opinion on RESP. I'm threatened by CEFI to be sued. Then I found your forum.

People, just make sure whatever you say here can be proved.

I can be contacted at edward@evpnet.com

-Edward

Hi Edward.

Thank you so much for the first reply in this forum.
No, I didn't have 8 units with CEFI.
I started with this RESP in Dec 2004 for my child. I put in $ 4000.00 right away and arranged monthly bank deduction from my account to make the plan work. In spring 2005 CEFI stopped the deduction from my account. After I talked to them I found out, that my child's SIN was not put in the plan agreement on time (DEC 2004). So they could not work with the money payed into the plan. They told me that they would take the total amount paid and use it for 2005 restarting deduction in 2006. Nothing worked out after that point anymore, The money was not in the RESP account. The local CEFI rep was no help. The callcentre did not find a solution. Several letters came, asking me to pay even more money since I did not pay anything in 2005 into the plan. Very bad management throughout the ordeal.
I thought starting with this forum will damage CEFI reputation a bit.


wabwab  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2007-10-17 08:54:35 --

One question that strikes me the most is "How is it possible that you give your money to somebody (CEFI) and they take a portion of it away from you?" Ask you friend to give you $20 dollars but tell him/her that you will only return $15. Look at his/her face.

If anybody can answer that please do so.

Remember this is not a mortgage or a line of credit. You give you money to CEFI not the other way around.

I've opened my own page about my CEFI experience here http://www.geocities.com/pelyavskied/

I have CEFI prospectus there. I would like to know one single person on earth who understands it completely.

-Edward

It is too bad that not more people are using this forum. I am pretty sure that there are many disappointed CEFI customers in Canada.

I'm so glad I found this forum because I really need to vent about CEFI.  We have twin daughters now in their 2nd year of university and still haven't been able to use a penny of our RESP.  We paid into CEFI for about 15 years.  We started when they were about 2-3 years old.  It should have matured in August of 2006, but didn't til 2007...that, i'll take responsibility for...I didn't spot that error til  it was too late to change it, and it would have cost us $900 to change the maturity day.  (Meaning, our girls graduated high school in June of 2006, but the plan didn't mature til August of 2007.)  So, fine, we left it as it was and it matured in August of 2007.  So we had to fill out the forms and send them in since the plan had now matured.  Now, we got a letter back saying our investment income has been put into another fund from which payments are made out of.  Still don't have a penny...so now, we are supposed to get an application form in the spring of 2008 to apply to get the money.  By then, our girls will have completed their 2nd year of university.  Also, my first daughter, is taking a 4 year kinesiology course, thus she is in her 2nd year since she started university in September of 2006.  Since the plan matured a year late, she is considered as only a first year student since this is her first year since the plan matured.   SO...if she only goes for the 4 year course, as she had planned, she doesnt get all of her investment income, since she only went 3 years since the plan matured.  AND, it isn't transferrable to my other daughter, since you have to decide to transfer it BEFORE it matures.  How dumb is that?  What if a kid changes their mind after the first couple of months of school?  They lose all that money because they can't transfer it to another person.  I'm REALLY disgusted with CEFI.  We'll have paid for 2 full years of university, and still not have been able to use a penny of the money we invested supposedly to make it easier for our kids to go to school.  I'm just hoping that in the spring, we'll get the money as they supposedly say we will.  I guess we'll just have to wait and see since they tell me we defiantely can't get our hands on the money til the spring.  Doesn't mean squat that our kids of in 2nd year of school...I would NEVER recommend this plan to anybody.  When we first signed up, the guy made it sound so easy, and it sounded like we'd just get our money once it matured...what a crock.    

Hello Jennybear.

Thank you so much for your interesting post about the "great support/advice" from CEFI. After such a long time investing your money with them and then you get so disappointed is in fact a terrible story. It is like Edward posted: "I would like to know one single person on earth who understands it completely."
I can not recommend this plan to anybody either, thank god I cancel with them early enough and the damage was not so huge (only $1600).  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2007-10-17 11:30:47 --

I have had nothing but trouble with CEFI from the very beginning of our relationship.  On the advice of an agent, I transferred my RESP savings to CEFI from another provider and I discovered much later that although there was NO maturity date written on my application form, like with Jennybear, the date they assigned was AFTER the childrens' first year of university which would cheat them out of the last EAP unless they chose post-graduate studies.  I would not be surprised to hear that more people have encountered this problem since when you are told that X amount of money will be available for your child's first year of university, you really do assume that you will indeed be getting the money then, not a year later, so you don't audit their work.  This works in CEFI's favour since they pay out less with these delayed maturity dates and if they change anything in your plan, you then forfeit the enrollment fees.  Win-win for them.  I should have known there would be trouble when the funds transfer was botched up and not solved for 2 years, and I had to keep on them or it would not be solved today.  2 years after that and after about a year of negotiations we settled the dispute about maturity dates and I thought the troubles were over but then it was time for my eldest child to actually get some money.  Nothing was sent to us upon maturity of the plan so we had to call to get the forms, then once they were filled in and sent on to CEFI and the university we again thought things would be okay.  Wrong.  We called the CEFI office in late July to check that our forms had been received and were told that if there were any problems we would have been contacted so not to worry.  Fast forward to end of August when we called to check on when funds would be received and were then told they hadn't received the confirmation from the university.  CEFI tells us they have no record of us phoning in July, but we know we called.  We called the university who then advised us that due to the wording on the form, they could not complete it until the students had actually registered for their 2nd year, which could't happen until Aug. 27th.  CEFI said that since our form was not received by Aug. 1st (despite our phone call and the university being unable to complete the form) we would have to pay a penalty of $200 plus tax.  We got documentation from the university but CEFI just doesn't care.  When we finally got some money from them on October 23rd, there were so many deductions that we could not believe it.  We were charged not $212, but $424 in late fees because CEFI split up our transfer from the other RESP provider into 2 plans, so they have charged us twice.  When we asked about the return of the enrollment fees which was touted as a big benefit of CEFI through all the literature that we received back when we signed up, we were now told that this return of enrollment fees is NOT guaranteed.  Nice bait & switch.  I have 3 more children with CEFI plans and I sorely regret ever doing business with this company.  After seeing the multitude of deductions (over 10% of our contributions), I am looking at alternatives to having to deal with them every year for the next 9 years.  Despite all of the errors made by the company, they have not once admitted any blame for agent errors, accounting dept. errors or any of the problems they have caused.  I think the company is laughing at us all, all the way to the bank.

Thank you for your post momnipotent. Interesting to read your case and experience with CEFI.
I like your statement:

Quote :

Despite all of the errors made by the company, they have not once admitted any blame for agent errors, accounting dept. errors or any of the problems they have caused.

I was told by a CEFI agent, that they meet sometimes for CEFI training at nice locations for a few days. Everything is paid for. This is not unusual for a company, unusual is that they meet in Spain and they use our money to pay for it, our hard earned money.
.  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2007-10-27 14:32:59 --

CEFI join Ombudsman Service: http://www.obsi.ca

You can file complaints there.  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2007-11-09 11:42:54 --

Thanks Edward,

great research.

As upset as I have been, at least it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who has been duped.  My family and I lost $2200.00 and 17 years of possible investment of that amount which is huge amount of money.
To make a long story short, my Father passed away the year we invested into the Children's Education Fund Inc.  This was our first child so it's the first time we've invested in an RESP.  CEFI's sales person for our area seemed very friendly.  She answered our questions (which we had a lot of).  We explained our situation about how we receieved a little money from my Father's life insurance policy.  We really wanted to put this towards our daughter's education.  We asked if we could put $2000.00 down for the first two years and then reduce the amount.  NO PROBLEM we were told.  Well there was a problem, if you reduce the amount of units then you lose your enrollment fees.  We invested $4000.00 and lost $2200.00 of it when we reduced our payments to $500.00.  I wrote CEFI about this and an arrangment was made to repay the $1500.00 + interest to bring our units back up to date.  We seriously thought about taking this offer but my wife was due with our second and was going to go on maturnity leave.  We didn't have enough cash to continually invest $2000.00/year.  Plus we wanted to start a fund for our second child (which is not with CEFI... by the way).
Finally, I asked for our money back (only what we paid in).  CEFI could keep the interest they made but they refused to do so.  

For more information about our experience please go to my blog which has a better account of what occurred between my family and CEFI.  http://cefiisapoorchoice.blogspot.com/

Thank you MOPE for all the information and for the great weblink to your detailed experience report.

I'm an RESP Group Plan sales rep with another company (NOT CEFI). I can say that among those who understand Group-RESP's (yes, even the prospectuses!) it is pretty universally understood among us that CEFI is the least flexible and hardest to get your money from, has the most deceptive advertising, and the least trained sales reps. I am sorry you have all had bad experiences with CEFI. I would never deal with them myself.

All RESP's (including mutual fund RESP's) are heavily regulated by the Government, which makes getting your money out of them a bit of a process. In that way, a lot of the blame should go to government bureaucrats, but CEFI DOES have a bad reputation within the Group RESP industry for being more difficult to deal with than they "need" to be.

One thing to consider about mutual fund RESP's: I've done some research, calling different banks and mutual fund companies just to see how well they understand the intricacies of RESP's in general. All Group-Plan RESP's (including CEFI) specialize in RESP's and have a WAY better knowledge of the RESP regulations, etc. than the banks and mutual fund companies. I've had some absolutely terrible information given to me by bank reps (even when I ask for the branch's resident expert in RESP's). Banks have only been doing RESP's for about 10 years (when the CESG came out in 1998), and not many of the children have had to redeem their funds yet. It'll be interesting to see how many people complain when they realize they were given bad information by their mutual fund rep. There is something to be said for dealing with an RESP specialist, just don't do it with CEFI. If you're stuck with it, though, it makes no sense to cancel and lose your enrollment fees. Just be forewarned if you have another child.

Here's my recommendation to all parents who have RESP's: be proactive. When your child is in Grade 11 or 12, call your RESP company and ask proactive questions - what do we need to do, etc. so that you don't miss the maturity date before making a change, or miss out on EAP's, etc. Sales reps of all sorts are more than willing to sign you up and get the commission, but most of them aren't still around by the time your kids go to school, so nobody will be calling you to make sure all is well. You have to be driving the bus!

True, CEFI has a bad reputation when it comes to customer service even if you do call them proactively. But not all companies are like that. If you have RESP's with other Plans, do not assume they are all like CEFI, cuz they're not. Thankfully.

Thank you RESP guy for some valid information. Great that a RESP pro is posting some insider knowledge here for us. Maybe you can give more details in what you think is a  good to deal RESP company.  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2008-05-28 15:54:18 --

I have been contributing to my sons RESP since 2002.  In 2005 I changed my banking information with the company.  In 2007, I noticed the money was not coming out of my bank account.  I called the company to ask what was going on and they assured me that the money was being deposited into the RESP.  I told them it wasn't coming out of my bank account.  She said it was being withdrawn from a bank account from a certain bank and I said that isn't my bank!  I was told they would look into it and get back to me.  When they got back to me I was told that they had made an error and the money was coming out of someone else's bank account!!  She said that if the people whose bank account it was being taken out of didn't notice it, it wouldn't have to be paid back, but it they notice I will have to pay back the $2100.   I said I shouldn't have to pay it back when it wasn't my mistake, in fact, I am the one who found the mistake.   I cannot afford to pay back this money, I AM A SINGLE MOTHER OF 2, that is why I got a fund to begin with.  I feel the person who made the mistake should pay for it, not me!

How many other people's money have they lost/miss-placed??  

I have contacted the local media to address this issue.

Thanks Darleen.

Another great example how professional CEFI is handling client’s money.  

--Last edited by wabwab on 2008-05-28 23:12:02 --

Wonderful forum! I will post my stories when I have more time these days. But in a word, from the experiences dealing with them, there are only two words I like to use: CEFI is Money Predator!

Hi FIGHTWITHCEFI, yes please post your CEFI points here. We all wait to get your story. Thanks. wabwab

We had a plan for our daughter where the original maturity date was in spring of 2006.  We submitted the forms to defer the maturity of the plan for one year since my daughter wanted to work for a year prior to starting her post-secondary education.  By doing this, the form states we would 'defer the savings until the nominee can have the maturity documentation completed by the post-secondary institution while preserving the CESG and Education Assistance Payments'.  In the summer of 2007, we submitted the necessary forms to have our net principal deposits returned since she was enrolled in a two year program of study.  We received that cheque in September of 2007.  This past summer we submitted the forms for the EAPs.  We understood that if a student is enrolled in a recognized two year diploma program, they would receive the full EAP in the second year of the program.  We are now finding out that this is not the case.  Only if you let them know in writing prior to the original maturity date of the plan will they pay the full amount.  The bottom line - if a student defers his/her schooling for a year(and the maturity of the plan), they lose 2/3 of their EAPs if they choose to enter a two year program (instead of four) without letting CEFI know they plan on doing so prior to the original maturity date.  There is a consequence to deferring the maturity of a plan.  How is a student to know if they are planning on attending a two year or four year program at the same time that they are deferring the maturity of the plan?  This 'eligibility' information is on page 23 of their prospectus (but not with the maturity documentation and form).  If you have a maturing plan - beware of this 'small print' way for CEFI to lower the EAP payments to the student.