Expense Account, Mint Why has cost become so central to the insurance product? Nobody talked about costs for decades when we all bought endowment and money-back plans. Those of us who are old enough to have these in our portfolio remember how they were sold—the promise was of a certain sum that would come back,...
Expense Account, Mint The government has made the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) the sole regulator of unit-linked insurance plans (Ulip) and amended the Acts governing other regulators to make its intentions clear. I have two views on this handing over of a hybrid product to one regulator instead of a joint-regulation mechanism with...
Expense Account, Mint Calvin and Hobbes play this wonderful game called Calvinball. The key feature of the game is that it operates under rules, but these are “subject to be changed, amended, or deleted by any player(s) involved. These rules are not required, nor necessary to play Calvinball”. This game looks suspiciously like the Indian...
Expense Account, Min My phone rings. It is an uncle who has just turned 60 wanting to know if he was doing the right thing with his retirement corpus. He’d called in a neighbour’s kid for advice. The kid works in a large private sector bank. She offered a bouquet of unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips)...