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Written by Ranjan
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Tuesday, 30 August 2011 12:25 |
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ULIPs (Unit Linked Insurance Plan), though conceptually a good financial product which covers both insurance and investment needs, have earned bad publicity due to their heavy front loaded charges. It is an interesting exercise in comparing them with mutual funds. Life Insurers have charged very heavy premium allocation charges initially. And when some Insurers advertised zero premium allocation charge, they tricked the investors by charging a heavy administration charge and not disclosed properly. Link, Mis-selling ULIPs
However AEGON Religare iMaximize Plan offers to maximize your investment by charging you zero premium allocation charge. And the policy administration charge, though a tad high at Rs 100/- per month is reasonable. And if you are net savvy, you can avoid the trouble of going through agents and get yourself insured directly, through their direct sales channels. I wish LIC could also come out with such an online plan. Details of the plan.
We had the opportunity to ask Mr. Yateesh Srivastava, Chief Marketing Officer, ARLI a few questions about their online channel and here are his responses.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 August 2011 12:43 |
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Read more... [iMaximize Plan: No Premium Allocation Charge For Online Buyers]
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Written by Ranjan
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Friday, 04 March 2011 10:15 |
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We all encounter pushy Agents who are hardselling their products. Many of us lack the courage of saying "No". It's because we don't give attention to buying financial products.
The cost of not doing enough research and believing the pushy agent is huge. Read the following letter where the person invested Rs 2.5 lakh and got back Rs 80 thousand after a few years!
The sad news is that nothing much can be done about it as the Insurer has the right to charge surrender and other charges and which is documented in the policy papers that the customer recieved. The customer may well have blindly signed the benefit illustration document that shows all the charges!
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Read more... [Yet Another Example of Insurance Mis-selling]
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Written by Ranjan
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Wednesday, 29 September 2010 19:19 |
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The ICICI Pru Life Insurance advertisement for their single premium ULIP called LifeLink Wealth SP promises multiple benefits by paying only once. To our mind, it hides much more that it reveals about their "unique" product.
For starters, the policy administration charges of Rs 60 per month for a single premium policy doesn't make any sense. Moreover, LIC's policy administration charges for their ULIP (Pension Plus) is only Rs 30/- pm. The premium allocation charge for LIC's Pension Plus single premium product is 3.3% while it is 5% for ICICI Pru LifeLink Wealth SP. Let's dig into the features of ICICI's single premium policy
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Read more... [ICICI Pru Life LifeLink Wealth Policy]
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Written by Ranjan
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Wednesday, 29 September 2010 10:31 |
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ULIPs have been blamed for the high upfront commissions to the Agents and a huge letdown for the customers. A fallout of the spat between SEBI and IRDA is that IRDA has tightened a lot of norms for ULIPs (Unit Linked Insurance Plan).
The new norms are supposed to be more customer friendly. In any case, the concept of combining insurance and investment into a single financial product was not a bad one. Let's take a look at the changes:
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 13:35 |
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Read more... [What Is The New ULIP Like?]
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