Need supply side solutions to solve the household finance problem in India

Why Indian households remain in financial behaviour that is ‘regressive’ is a question that has wrinkled the brows of many a policy maker. ‘Regressive’ behaviour is the over-exposure of Indian households to cash, gold and real estate instead of financial assets. This behaviour includes a reliance on the moneylender for debt, rather than the formal financial system, and the use of ex-post borrowings to deal with medical and other emergencies rather than purchasing an insurance contract. With the mandate of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Tarun Ramadorai committee set out to find answers to some of these questions in 2016. While other committees have looked at the same issue of the strange behaviour of Indian households from the supply side and found serious problems in the way formal markets have been set up, the Ramadorai Committee was asked to look at the problem from the demand side and provide solutions to it. In short, the committee found (read the report here: bit.ly/2iC3GKU) that Indian households are indeed globally unique in their financial behaviour. Not only do they rely heavily on gold and real estate, they are under-insured, have very little pension corpus build-up, take home mortgages much later in life than their mature-market counterparts, and walk into retirement still carrying the burden of debt on their heads.

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Real estate—is it time to buy?

How do we know when a market is overvalued? The equity market looks at price: earning (P-E) ratios, book value, price earning to growth (PEG) ratios and valuations to see if stocks, or entire markets, are overpriced or underpriced. Is there a similar metric for real estate, a rule of thumb that tells you when a property, or the whole real estate market, is overpriced or underpriced? Mature markets use some rough rules of thumb to decide over- or under-pricing in real estate. The first is the ‘gross rent ratio’. Divide the sale price of a property with the gross annual rent it will get. Gross rent does not account for costs of the loan, maintenance or society fees. If a flat sells for Rs1 crore and can be rented for Rs50,000 a month, or Rs6 lakh a year, the gross rent ratio is 16.6. Real estate investors use a rough rule of thumb that says: buy at 10 and sell at 20. Buy when the rent ratio is 10 and sell when it touches 20 because the property is overvalued. The second metric is the yield which just switches the two numbers. Divide the gross annual rent by the sale value of the property. The annual rent of Rs6 lakh divided by a capital value of Rs1 crore gives a yield of 6%. Mature market thumb rules say buy at a yield of 5% and sell at 10%.

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70 years of saving and investing in India

If in the 1950s somebody wrote a future finance story about India, they may not have predicted the market that faces a retail consumer today. Till the 1990s, your savings and investing decisions were dependent on the government. No wonder Indian households chose gold and real estate as saving sumps. The financial sector was a reflection of the overall direction of the economy. Costs were high, service poor in state-owned and run finance. But post 1991, change came suddenly to finance and this column maps some of those changes as India celebrates 70 years of political and 26 years of economic freedom.

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Being Zen in frenzied times

Low Risk High Return Buy 5000 SHARES Of xxxx CMP Rs 7.80 TGT Rs 15 SL Rs 7.70 . Stock Raise Non Stop Till Diwali.” Over the past few weeks some of us would have got messages pushing this one stock.

As markets keep moving up, the frenzied calls and SMS texts that push up a particular stock increase in frequency. I don’t get emails or WhatsApp messages pitching stocks—just calls and SMSes. Some of the callers are really aggressive. Push back at them and they start snarling. Obviously they’re sitting on very steep customer acquisition targets. But we know from past experience that any kind of frenzy usually ends badly. If you gave into the frenzy of real estate a few years back, you’re looking at a nominal erosion of 30-40% of the price you paid. An inflation- and mortgage-cost-adjusted loss will be closer to 50-60%. Frenzies are unsettling. You lose your equilibrium. You get pushed into doing things that you normally won’t do. If you find yourself thinking of suddenly moving money into one stock or one mid-cap mutual fund on a tip, you know you’ve succumbed to the frenzy. Otherwise I’m-safe-in-an-FD (fixed deposit) people are suddenly discovering their risk appetite and want to invest right away on a tip.

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Trying to get the right mediclaim can make you sick with worry

Anybody who has struggled with trying to select a mediclaim policy will know how painful it can be. There is plenty of choice and lots of hard sales push, but no way to know what works for you. There is an information gap in the market today—there is plenty of information out there but it is of little use to somebody wanting to buy a policy. Until you have an experience of hospitalization, you would not know what features are important. It took me one stint with a family member suffering from food poisoning to find out what a sub-limit means. For those still out of the loop—if your medical policy comes with a ‘sub limit’ clause, there will be a limit to what the company will pay for room rents.

As consumers, we’ve moved quite a distance from buying the cheapest policy in the market. Low premiums can also mean lots of things hidden in the fine print that the policy does not pay—like a high room rent or for treatment of a particular disease or a particular medicine. At the very basic level, a mediclaim policy is good if it comes at a reasonable price, promises good benefits and pays up the claims when they are made. Sounds simple enough, but begin reading a policy document and you will be stumped to decode what the jargon means. The Mint SecureNow Mediclaim Rating does the grunge work for you and trawls through some 400 data points to bring you a shortlist of policies that make the cut on the three parameters.

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