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At Yahoo: ULIPs or Mutual Funds?
A small story at Yahoo on the choice: Ulips or Mutual Funds. (Posted in entirety) It was the day they’d talked about 9 years ago. The first day of 2011. “I’m on my way.” Ganesh Raghupathi sighed. He...
View ArticleULIPs: No More "Cover Continuance"?
It turns out(*) that the new guidelines for ULIPs in 2010 have claimed another victim: Cover Continuance. The concept, prior to September 2010: if you bought a ULIP and stopped paying premiums after...
View ArticleIRDA’s Guidelines on Web Aggregators
IRDA has produced "draft" guidelines on Web Aggregators (HT: Medianama) that will regulate "web aggregators. I now discuss the points in the guidelines (download here): What are "Aggregators"?...
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Chart Of The Day: New Insurance Premium Growth
Insurers have been losing some steam over the last two years, but how much? Taking new premium over all products, bought by individuals since 2009 shows us how things are: August saw a strange spike...
View ArticleIRDA’s Final Insurance Aggregator Guidelines
IRDA has released guidelines for “web aggregators”. (I’ve written about this earlier) These are final guidelines and will be applicable from February 2012. There has been some consternation regarding...
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Chart Of The Day: New Policy Premiums Down 21%
New insurance premium is waning, says Sunaina Vasudev at BS. Overall, nwe premiums have fallen 21% with Reliance, Bajaj and ICICI seeing their new premiums cut but more than a third. In quantity, LIC...
View ArticleWhy You Shouldn’t ‘Invest’ in Life Insurance
At Yahoo, I write about Why you shouldn’t invest in Life Insurance: The three reasons people buy insurance is: a) To save tax. b) As an investment, to make a good return on their money. c) To feel good...
View ArticleInsurance: Full Tax on Surrender If Premium>10% of Sum Assured [Corrected]
Missed in the glory of the Budget 2012 are key changes in Life Insurance. No 80C deduction if your Premium’s greater than 10% of the sum assured Under Section 80C, you got an exemption for insurance...
View ArticleInsurance: Pay 3% or 1.5% Service Tax Now
Till last year, service tax was chargeable on the premium you paid for Term insurance policies. Even in ULIPs the service tax was only charged on the portion related to “mortality charges”, if it was...
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ULIP Underperformance: Stunted By Guarantees
Unit Linked Insurance Policies tend to be very complex and highly loaded with costs. But some policies have looked good in theory, but they turn out to be dud performers anyhow. In an email...
View ArticleGuest Blog: Insurance Funds Should Invest in All Classes of Bonds
This is a guest post by Karthik Shashidhar, who's both a good friend and a great quant and data guy. He writes in on a recent IRDA directive. Earlier today, I was going through some “Exposure drafts”...
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Don’t Buy HDFC Crest – It is Not a Fixed Deposit
I have now had a few people complaining to me - including my own mother - that relationship managers in HDFC Bank have been strongly selling HDFC Crest, a life insurance product, while they were...
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New Business for Insurers Continues Decline in 2012
Insurers seem to be getting lesser new business, as new premiums (single premium policies + new regular premium policies) drop 4.2% in the first half of the year. Last year, new policy premiums had...
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Insurance Profits from Surrenders, But Not *That* Much
LiveMint has an article by Monika Halan and Deepthi Bhaskaran talking about how investors lost Rs. 1.5 trillion (150,000 crore) rupees due to mis-selling. I’m however not convinced by their number...
View ArticleKeyman Insurance Loophole Plugged: All Proceeds Will Be Taxed, No Exemption
Budget 2013 has plugged a loophole in the tax system. Consider a small company that wanted to pay its management a bonus based on a large profit it had received.The company can deduct the amount paid,...
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Insurance Sector Slows Down, New Premiums Fall 6%
New premiums in Life Insurance companies are down about 6% in 2012-13, and that follows a tough year earlier. (From the RBI Financial Stability Report) ULIPs are nearly dead. LIC sold next to nothing...
View ArticleULIPs : A good investment?
(Some of you have asked for the "basics" of investing - I'm writing an article about this, and hope to have it ready soon) Meanwhile, I was recently evaluating Unit Linked Insurance Plans (ULIPs) - the...
View ArticleInsurance: A primer
Everyone's talking about Insurance nowadays. What is it? And why should you, a regular salaried employee buy it? Why should the business owner buy it? Why should ANYONE buy it? What is Insurance? If...
View ArticleULIP NAVs: Where?
There seems to be no single place which you can query for NAVs (Net Asset Values) of ULIP (Unit Linked Insurance Plans) of various Insurance Companies in India. (I have spoken about ULIPs earlier, here...
View ArticleTerm plan premiums
A number of people have asked me what the premiums are plain term plans offered by various companies. Here's the figures I've collated: Company Age: 31 years (30 yr term) Age: 40 years (15 yr term)...
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