Towards the end of being good

Expense Account, Mint

There is a problem in being good. Or as Gurcharan Das asks in his book, The Difficulty of Being Good, On the Subtle Art of Dharma—“why be good?” The first time I questioned this basic premise that has been drilled into most “service class” people as we call ourselves was many years ago when the kid came back from school all beaten and scratched. She’d been hit. So why did you not complain? There was nobody around. Hit back? But you said good kids don’t hit others. The problem of being good.

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You’ve been mis-sold a policy if…

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 repayment will make your credit history tainted. And you really have to run around to rectify that. Even after the problem is long solved. So what happens when the company makes an error? Usually you have to still pay for their systems being in error unless you really run around. But what if there is no error but a wilful intent to cheat. What should you do if your financial life is at risk due to a product that was sold to you by deceit?

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Your financial life is OK when…

Expense Account, Mint

As I read through the pages and pages of questions from viewers sent by my producer for the weekly show that Mintdoes with NDTV, one distinct pattern emerges. Most people have the makings of a financial plan, but are simply unsure of how to proceed. Going to the next step means knowing that so far is so good. “Am I doing OK?” is possibly the question most often asked at the end of viewers’ mail. Each person is different and each piece of advice I give is customized to a particular situation. But are there some basic running rules that we can still distil out that are not purely theoretical and take into account the fact that we live very complicated lives with little time for nuanced attention to different parts of our lives?

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Ulips: re-made in India

Expense Account, Mint

Armed with basic knowledge of an Excel sheet and some dribbles of wisdom after a basic capital markets course, when I opened a unit-linked insurance plan (Ulip) brochure five years ago and tried to do the math, I fell off my chair. The sheet showed me a product that was so inherently unfair and loaded against the investor that I thought I had mis-understood it. But long hours spent decoding various products (with lots of work put in by a trainee who is now India’s ace insurance reporter and works in Mint) told me that the conclusion was right: The Ulip product was a trap. What do you call a product that allows the entire first-year investment to be used as cost? What do you call a product that swallows the entire first- and second-year investment if you dare stop funding the product? What do you call a product that pushes forward a lifetime of costs in the first two years and then pushes you to exit—leaving your money behind? All those who were mis-sold the Ulip product in the last few years are now understanding the extent of the fraud.

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