Expense Account, Mint India is not alone in blindly staggering around for a solution to the problem of getting the last mile correct in retail financial products. I’m back after a week in Seoul (pronounced to rhyme with Yowl), South Korea, as a spousal add-on to a global financial planning congress. Spouses, luckily, were invited...
If you, the customer, are a day late in a credit card bill payment or a phone or electricity bill, you’re fined. Don’t pay for some time and you begin to get legal notices. The electric supply company will simply cut supply. The phone company will cut the connection. A small error in home loan...
Expense Account, Mint When is a good time to invest?” This question comes in the league table of the top five questions around personal money decisions, the others being how much to invest, am I saving enough, what should I invest in and am I doing OK? Though it sounds generic, the question is about...
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
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, Mint It is finally done. The US has now moved to the next stage of the financial crisis—this is where the brooms, antiseptic and hot water come out to clean out the goop left behind by the unadulterated greed of a handful of suits on Wall Street. Even as the news of the...
Expense Account, Mint This week, fresh guidelines from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) attempted to deal with some of the issues that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has raised in its notice to 14 insurance companies earlier this year ordering them to stop selling mutual funds that masquerade as insurance...
Expense Account, Mint You could not have missed the large ads in the last two weeks, advertising 100% returns over the last year. Are they lying? Is this another scam? It is too good to be true. None of the above. The advertised funds have indeed doubled your money over a year. And so have...
Expense Account, Mint Clearly many people out there are keen to see the distribution industry in India mature. The response to my last week’s column that predicted the shape of the industry over the next few years got people mailing and calling. One mail and one conversation need a wider discussion. Ganesh Sankaran of LatentView, a consultancy...
Expense Account, Mint This year will go down as one in which a fog of confusion enveloped consumers and distributors of financial products. While mutual fund agents feel as if the regulations are trying to kill their business, insurance agents are protesting reform that is yet to be announced. Consumers are confused about what to pay,...