Life insurance must surely figure among the most misunderstood financial products in India. Some folks think of their insurance policy as an investment, others as a compulsory portfolio component and yet others as an estate planning vehicle.
Most Indians harbour the notion that they cannot do without life insurance. One of the first ‘investment’ products that young Indians are encouraged to buy, on landing a job, is an insurance policy. But this is based on a flawed understanding of life insurance as a product. Life insurance isn’t designed to enrich someone on your death. Its primary purpose is to compensate your dependants for the loss of your income in the event of your untimely death. So yes, there are many categories of folks who simply don’t need to buy life insurance. Here are the main ones.
When buying life insurance, most good advisors recommend that you go in for a pure term plan. A pure term plan is an insurance policy that offers life cover (with no investment component, bells or whistles – we’ll tell you why you don’t need those in a later article) for a specific ‘term’ or period of your life.
With interest rates on debt options falling steeply in the past year, retirees, pensioners and those seeking to supplement their income with fixed deposit schemes have seen a sharp dip in their cash flows. In this context, it is good to see India’s largest bank – State Bank of India (SBI) – coming up with a special deposit scheme for senior citizens while revising its fixed deposit rates recently.
After the Franklin Templeton debacle, CEOs of asset management companies have been out in big numbers across media to reassure investors that this was an isolated case and that there’s no crisis for the debt fund industry itself.
With returns failing to match risks and RBI relief measures complicating life for lenders, the next six months promise to be a minefield for debt investors. Here’s how you can navigate this
Warren Buffett never fails to recommend it and 90% of US fund managers struggle to beat it. If you’re wondering what this miracle investment is, it’s the US S&P 500 index. Indian investors will soon have the opportunity to buy this US benchmark locally with Motilal Oswal AMC launching an open-end index fund replicating it.
Given rate adjustments by other banks and NBFCs recently, a significant rate cut may soon be in the offing in this deposit as well. Investors and seniors looking for deposit options should lock into this FD before rates are revised.
These are extraordinary times for fixed income investors. Interest rates, after recent rate cuts by the MPC, are ruling at lows not seen in the last two decades. The repo rate of 4.4% today is even below levels seen during the global financial crisis. Keeping all this in mind, we have made significant changes to our curated list of deposits. Here are the three key sets of changes to the list and why we made them.
Repo and reverse repo rate cut, asymmetric LAF corridor, Long Term Repo Operations, moratorium. With words like these used freely in RBI’s package announced on Friday, ordinary borrowers and investors may be wondering if they have anything to cheer about. If you’ve been puzzled too, here are the measures explained in plain English.
The COVID-19 outbreak in India is wreaking unforeseen damage on household finances by leading to runaway expenses, interrupted incomes and a heightened risk of job losses. This has served to underline that an emergency or contingency fund should be the starting point of any financial planning exercise. But how large should this contingency fund be and where should it be invested? This crisis offers a few lessons.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Therefore, Indian fixed income investors may need to brace for a further plunge in interest rates in the coming months. • With rates cuts likely, lock into the options mentioned here, before March 31, 2020.
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