Jan 31, 2008

Unit Linked Insurance Plan (ULIP) - Kolkata

Unit linked insurance plan (ULIP) is life insurance solution that provides for the benefits of protection and flexibility in investment. The investment is denoted as units and is represented by the value that it has attained called as Net Asset Value (NAV). The policy value at any time varies according to the value of the underlying assets at the time.

ULIP provides multiple benefits to the consumer.

The benefits include :
  • Life protection
  • Investment and Savings
  • Flexibility
  • Adjustable Life Cover
  • Investment Options
  • Transparency
  • Options to take additional cover against
  • Death due to accident
  • Disability
  • Critical Illness
  • Surgeries
  • Liquidity
  • Tax planning
Kotak Life Insurance Ltd.'s ULIP Insurance Plans -

If you are interested, please Call Me or SMS.

Jan 25, 2008

Kotak Safe Investment Plan II

Kotak Safe Investment Plan II is a unit linked plan that combines the benefits of insurance and capital market returns into one.

What makes investing in Kotak Safe Investment Plan II truly unique is that you enjoy a Guaranteed Maturity Value, with varying degrees of equity exposure depending on your risk appetite. So, if the market value of your units is higher, you reap the benefits with the peace of mind that whilst in a bear market your investment is under-pinned by the Guaranteed Maturity Value. And there’s more, the returns are totally tax-free*.

Why should you invest in Kotak Safe Investment Plan II?

  • If you have never invested in the equity markets, for the fear of loss of capital. With Kotak Safe investment Plan II, you need not worry about losing your capital as you have the downside risk protected by way of the Guaranteed Maturity Value.
  • If you have been an investor in debt markets, you could switch a portion of your funds to equity markets via Kotak Safe Investment Plan II. The plan offers you the potential to earn higher returns with the safety net of a Guaranteed Maturity Value.
  • If you are an aggressive investor in equities, you could protect the downside risk in a bear market by investing a portion of your funds in the Kotak Safe Investment Plan II. What you are essentially doing is that while you enjoy equity returns, your money is protected from abysmal lows and market vagaries by way of a Guaranteed Maturity Value.

Policy Entry Age :
Min. 0 (zero) year & Max. 65 yeras
Policy Term : Min. 10 yeras or 18 minus entry age (in case of minors)
Premium Amount : Min. Rs. 18,000 per year

What do you receive on the maturity of the policy?
With the Kotak Safe Investment Plan II, your money grows 2.5 to 3 times on maturity*.

Death Benefit
"In the event of unfortunate death, your beneficiary would get the sum assured (less any partial withdrawals made from the main account during the 2 years immediately preceding death .If death occurs after attainment of age 60, all the partial withdrawals made from age 58 onwards will be set off against the sum assured) or Fund Value in the Main Account whichever is higher. Plus, if you have made any top-up investments, then you would get back the fund value in the Top-Up Accounts.

Where the life insured is a minor, the Death Benefit during the first 5 years of the policy term or below the age of 18, will only be the greater of all premiums paid (excluding rider premiums) and the fund value in the Main account Plus Fund value in the Top up accounts."

Taxation:
Tax benefits under section 80C and section 10(10D) are available as per applicable tax laws.


For other Life Insurance Plans (Endowment Plan, Child Advantage Plan, Retirement Income Plan, Easy Growth Plan, Flexi Plan, Smart Advantage Plan, etc) CONTACT @ 0091 - 9830329228 [Kolkata, India]

Jan 24, 2008

If you died tonight, what will your family do?

“Does my family really need Rs. 2 crore on my death?” When I suggested Rs. 2 crore as sum assured for a customer, this was his immediate reaction. Typical of us, I thought. When a sales person gives us a product/scheme our first thought goes to the ‘commission’ he or she makes. I keep wondering why. Even our vegetable vendor has to assure us that the last rupee that we try to squeeze out of him is what he makes. It makes us feel happy. We completely forget that we need tomatoes, which we can afford, and which we like. Why should it be our concern how much he makes?

So, I set out to tell the client the following. We buy life insurance to replace income lost due to the death of the breadwinner. The amount of life insurance you need depends on the ‘income stream’ you would want to continue for your family if anything happened to you. Let’s say you earn Rs.800,000 a year. This money provides your family’s lifestyle and standard of living. As long as you are alive and well, your loved ones will remain financially secure. What happens when the breadwinner (read ‘You’) are no longer able to earn this money?

Bluntly, if you died tonight, what would your family do? How would they pay the home loan EMI, car loan, society charges, utilities, taxes and other bills? Where would the money come from for new clothes for your children, for college fees, or even for your spouse to enjoy an evening out with friends?Very few people are comfortable answering this question. They live like they will never die and most will die like they never lived. When you have lived a good life, and have a family that you ‘love’ your answers have to be far, far better than these… That’s why we buy life insurance.

So that the answer to that question is, without hesitation or doubt: “They’ll be provided for.”How much life insurance do you need? The chart below shows the annual income the insurance proceeds can generate based on the following assumptions: The beginning amount will earn a 5% return after taxes, with principal and interest depleted in 20 years by withdrawing an amount equal to 8% of the original principal every year. Note that different assumptions will generate different results.

Example: A life insurance death benefit of Rs.10,000,000 would provide your family with an income stream of Rs.800,000 a year for a 20-year period, after which the entire amount would be depleted. So, if you earn Rs.800,000 a year, you may wish to consider Rs.10,000,000 of life insurance. How expensive is that? That depends on a number of factors, including your age, health and personal habits (such as whether or not you smoke), and type of insurance.

You have several insurance options, depending on need, budget and situation:

  • Term life insurance provides pure death benefit protection, generally for the smallest cost. It is ideal for the person who needs a high amount of coverage but cannot afford endowment for now.
  • Endowment policies can provide lifelong protection for a fixed, level premium. Additionally, it combines death benefit with cash value accumulation. However, the initial cost is generally higher than for a comparable amount of term life insurance.
  • Unit Linked Insurance Policy (ULIP) are a fairly new entrant in the insurance space. They are plans that offer a mix of protection and investment (two-in-one package).
You can have both! Let me tell you what my customer did. Without worrying too much about the premium he took a term insurance policy of Rs. 2 crore about 4 years back from the cheapest source. Every year he has been adding Rs. 5 lakhs of endowment policies – a nice way to keep up with the inflation, and the fact that the booming economy has taken his income from earth to stratosphere he is more inclined to save. Contrary to his first reaction his wife and children wouldn’t be rich.

However, they would be able to continue to enjoy the financial security and standard of living he has worked so hard to build for them. Life insurance can replace income lost due to the death of an income earner. It is a cost-effective way to make sure your dreams are completed if you die and are unable to complete them yourself. You may not need Rs 2 crore of life insurance. You may need less. You may need more. The important thing is to make sure you have the amount that’s right for you.

Remember your dreams are joint dreams. Do not leave your spouse to fend for herself. Give her the confidence to tell the kids, “Papa has become a star, but nothing will change for us”. Give conviction to her voice. Let the 6th birthday be at the same hotel as the 5th birthday. Let the interior decorator be told, yes the plans remain the same. Let the kids dream of an Ivy League education. Let the father, father-in-law, and brother-in-law not decide where your wife should stay. Let not the kids who lost one parent to fate lose the other parent to a full time job.

Simple, insurance is not because you will die. It is because they will live. We in the financial planning industry cannot protect lives. We try to protect lifestyles. The odds favor us over doctors who try to protect lives.

CONTACT FOR A LIFE INSURANCE POLICY : 0091 - 9830329228 [Kolkata, India]

Selecting the Right Life Insurance Plan

The idea of life-insurance will probably first come your way when you are planning your tax returns. That’s how it is for most Indians – insurance is a tax saving device. Well, there is a lot more to life insurance that it pays to know. Let’s begin by looking at every step of getting insurance.

Selecting the right life insurance plan:

Life Insurance in India is offered by a number of players, including:

  • Aviva Life Insurance
  • Bajaj Allianz
  • Birla Sun Life Insurance
  • Future Generali India Life Insurance Company Limited
  • HDFC Standard Life Insurance
  • ICICI Prudential
  • Kotak Life Insurance
  • Life Insurance Corporation of India
  • Max New York Life
  • MetLife
  • Reliance Life Insurance
  • Sahara India Life Insurance
  • SBI Life Insurance
  • Shriram Life Insurance.
  • Tata AIG Life

Each of them offers many different types of policies. Broadly, you can choose from Term Insurance or Endowment policies. In addition, there are Unit Linked Insurance Plans (ULIP) that offer the twin objectives of risk protection and capital appreciation. In my personal opinion, ULIPs (Unit Linked Insurance Plan) are the best today..

Term Insurance

A term insurance policy is the most inexpensive type of insurance policy. As the name suggests, it covers the policyholder only during the term of the insurance. The benefit gets paid only if the holder dies during that period. So what happens if he lives beyond the term period? Well, the holder gets nothing.

Perhaps the simplest form of life insurance, the only purpose of this type of insurance is protection. It was developed to provide temporary life insurance on a limited budget. Since a large amount of cover can be purchased for a small initial premium, term insurance is good for short-term goals such as providing extra protection during child raising years.

Within term insurance, you can opt for either an annual renewable term or a level term life insurance.

Annual renewable term means you renew the term every year and you pay an increasing premium every time, since obviously the likelihood of dying will increase with age. Sooner or later, the premiums paid will become unviable and exceed the cost of a permanent policy. But of course the likelihood of payout will also increase commensurately.

Level term life insurance makes the same costs more even on your pocket by averaging them out over the entire term, which means the higher costs do not accumulate towards the end.

Endowment Insurance

An endowment policy helps you meet the twin goals of savings and protection. You get life cover for a certain period here too, but if you do not die during the term, you still get certain the sum assured plus any bonuses, upon maturity. Premium is generally higher than term insurance.

Unit Linked Insurance Policy

ULIPs are a fairly new entrant in the insurance space. They are plans that offer a mix of protection and investment. Meaning, part of your premium goes towards mortality charges and the rest gets invested in an investment plan of your choice. This investment plan is a mix of debt and equity, and you get to choose what percentage each will be.

The good news about ULIPs is the two-in-one package, plus flexibility in altering your premium and sum assured. But the bad news is that the charges for a ULIP plan often far exceed what you would have paid if you had invested separately in a term insurance plan and a mutual fund scheme.

In mutual fund investments, expenses charged for various activities like fund management, sales, marketing and administration are subject to pre-determined upper limits as prescribed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

When it comes to ULIPs though, insurance companies do not have an upper limit and have complicated expense structures. The percentage of your premium allocated to investment in the first two years is typically anywhere between 20% to 80%, given the high premium allocation charge during these years. This means, all your money is not invested, and this is something you ought to know, even if your agent might not inform you.

Tax benefits under section 80 c are available to both ULIPs and mutual funds, but you should take a call only after you carefully study all charges associated with the ULIP and determine if it is more profitable than a pure insurance plan in combination with a mutual fund investment.

A combination of plans

Always remember though, you can mix and match plans till you have adequately covered risk and invested well. You don’t need to confine yourself to a single type of policy. You could take a term insurance policy from the cheapest source for a short period, and then add endowment policies every year as a way to keep up with the inflation.

Deciding on coverage

Don’t use ‘thumb rules’ while deciding insurance cover. If you are going to be paying hefty premiums, you might as well spend some time calculating how much insurance you need rather than multiplying your income by 7, and buying approximately that amount of insurance, like most people would suggest.

Here are a couple of ways you could do it.

The Human Life Value Approach

This approach calculates how much life insurance a family will need based on the financial loss the family will incur if a person passes away. Using the insured individual’s age, gender, planned retirement age, occupation, annual wage, employment benefits, as well as the personal and financial information of the spouse and/or dependent children, one can determine the financial contribution from the insured to the family. This approach is usually used for a working member of the family.

In the human life approach, one tries to replace all of the income that’s lost when an employed family member dies. The income will include after-tax pay, less expenses incurred while earning that income. Health insurance or other employee benefits also help in augmenting income, and need to be factored in as well.

Once the income is determined, you need to decide the sum assured based on assumptions of return on the corpus. Suppose you decide an income stream of Rs 80,000 has to be generated in a year for your family to get by. Assuming a 5% return per annum on your corpus, after taxes, you can aim for a sum assured of Rs 1,000,000. This corpus will allow withdrawals of Rs 80,000 every year for at least 20 years, a comfortable situation.

The Needs Approach

The needs approach contrasts with the human life approach, in that it calculates how much life insurance is required by an individual/family to cover their needs (i.e. expenses). You work backwards from the required expenses to arrive at the income stream needed to support this, rather than track previous income streams and seek to maintain it, like in the human life approach.

Needs include funeral expenses, legal fees, estate and gift taxes, business buyout costs, probate fees, medical deductibles, emergency funds, mortgage expenses, rent, debt and loans, college, child care, private schooling and maintenance costs.

It is crucial in the needs approach to overestimate your needs a little. After all, the cost of being over- insured is not so substantial compared to the risk in being under-insured and being left with an inadequate income stream.

Selecting your nominee

Once you have decided on your sum assured, you will need to select a nominee who will receive the sum assured in the event of death. This has to be a very careful exercise, leaving no room for misinterpretation, given the money involved.

Indicate your beneficiaries by name and designation and review your choices regularly, at important occasions in your life - marriage, childbirth, divorce, career change, economic change, etc. Your nominee list, for example, might need to expand to include the newest addition to your family.

You could consider naming beneficiaries by class or group – for example, ‘All children of insured’ could be your specification. But if this is not such a homogenous class - the case if you have had more than one marriage - well, remember to specify who exactly you are referring to. For a complete understanding of implications your nominee designation might have, discuss the laws applicable to you with your consultant and get specific recommendations on what to do.

CONTACT FOR A LIFE INSURANCE POLICY : 0091 - 9830329228 [Kolkata, India]

Life Insurance Benefits - Support for Your Family After You Pass

Although no one likes to think about when they are going to pass away, sometimes we need to pause to make sure we would have no regrets if something happened tomorrow. Even though it is scary to think about, everyone should understand the importance of life insurance. If something were to happen, how would it effect your loved ones financially?

As unfortunate as it is, a lot of people do not have life insurance. This leaves their families grieving with their loss, along with coming up with the money for a funeral and all of the other expensive measures taken. If you know that when your time has come your family would make sure everything is just the way you would want it to be, then you should act now to get life insurance so losing money is not a problem after losing a loved one.

Thinking that your last days may not be that far away is a frightening thought, but not having a plan for yourself or loved ones after you pass away is not a good thought either. Life insurance not only covers your funeral costs but medical costs that might have been in connected with your death. If you were to leave tomorrow wouldn’t you want your spouse, children, or even parents to be able to receive money incase they do not have the funds for themselves.

If you think now is the time to get life insurance you can easily learn more and find a policy by doing research on the internet. Sometimes you don’t even have to have a plan for yourself. There are a couple other options you have if they apply to you. In some cases you can get life insurance if you are a student. Also, some work places offer life insurance as work benefits. If either of these situations are familiar to you, it is a great idea to take advantage of them. If not, simply ask around or find a reliable company from which you can get an insurance policy from.

Like any other insurance plan, it is important to do your research and find which policy would best suite you financially. Considering you will have options make sure to pick the best one, and when you do write down what you plan to do with your money when you pass on. Also consider beginning some debt management to not waste the money after you are gone. Always keep in mind that all companies are different so do not forget to take into consideration the benefits and prices you will receive from each one.

CONTACT FOR A LIFE INSURANCE POLICY : 0091 - 9830329228 [Kolkata, India]

Insurance Benefits for your Family and Children

There are many insurance benefits that can be realized by your family and your children, if you take the time to choose the right insurance products. In many cases, the insurance benefits for your family may help them get through the difficult period that will occur, if anything adverse happens to you. There are many different types of insurance products to choose from and the insurance policies that you choose will affect the amount of benefits that your family receives in the event of your illness, injury, or demise.

One of the most important insurance instruments that will provide benefits to the family is the life insurance policy. This policy is used to ensure that any existing debts that you have will not be a burden to your family if you die unexpectedly. The life insurance policy is also used to provide the family with money to pay bills or pay for the funeral, especially if you were the primary wage earner for the household.

The life insurance policy should be purchased because of the price and the insurance benefits that will be provided to your family after your death. The benefits should be sufficient for the family to replace the loss of income for the household for a specific period of time, usually at least six months to one year, and also allow the family to pay for immediate expenses, such as funeral arrangements, mortgage payments, or credit card debt, that may not have been resolved prior to your demise.

It is important to choose a life insurance policy that is issued by a reputable insurance company. There are many pretenders out there that mimic well known insurance companies and offer a low monthly premium in order to attract your business, but then either disappear or make your family jump through endless hoops to obtain the benefits that rightfully belong to them. By choosing a reputable insurance company to purchase the life insurance policy from, you will assure that the insurance benefits for your family are provided as promised when the unfortunate event occurs

The insurance benefits provided by the insurance company depend on the type of life insurance policy that is purchased. Policies that supply greater insurance benefits for your family will generally cost more in monthly premiums. The age and health of the individual at the time that the life insurance policy is purchased may also affect the monthly premium for the policy.

Purchasing an life insurance policy can ensure that your family does not face undue hardship, if they lose you unexpectedly to an accident or illness, and it will allow them to provide you with the funeral service that you desire. Before purchasing the life insurance policy, you should be sure that the policy is provided by a reputable insurance company and that it provides the benefits that your family will need after you are gone. The insurance benefits will provide your family with solace in a time of crisis, so be sure to obtain the needed insurance benefits for your family.

CONTACT FOR A LIFE INSURANCE POLICY : 0091 - 9830329228 [Kolkata, India]