HDFC Life has recently launched its online term insurance plan called Click 2 Protect plan. With this HDFC Life becomes one the few online term insurance providers in India. The minimum and maximum sum assured under this Click 2 Protect Term plan is Rs 10 lacs and 10 crores. And the Policy term can be between 10 yrs to 30 yrs with yearly premium payment mode. Any person between 18 and 55 can take this Click 2 protect term plan from HDFC life.
There are no riders in this term plan and on premium front its very affordable . For example For some one aged 25 yrs old the premium for 1 crore sum assured would be just Rs 8,600 yearly , for a tenure of 30 yrs . For more information , look at this brochure
As per a DNA report, 68% of residential flats in Mumbai costs more than Rs 1 crore. This was based on a study done by Liases and Foras, a real estate research firm. Only less than 2% of the flats are in range of Rs 25-50 lacs and over 30% flats are worth more than 2 crores.
Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry president Paras Gundecha admitted that realty prices are going beyond the common man’s reach because of high cost of labour, construction and land prices. He says instead of selling land at a reasonable rate, the authorities, including the National Textile Corporation and the state, are e-auctioning land. – source
From now, All the Mutual fund investors will get a monthly consolidated statement of all of their transactions in different fund houses mutual funds, said – Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) . “This is an investor-friendly initiative to allow investors a single-window view of all their transactions in mutual funds,” Chief Executive of AMFI H N Sinor said. The basis for consolidation and grouping for all the transactions will be PAN provided for the investments.
Note that this monthly statements will come to investors along with the regular statements they get from AMC’s .
From next year all the bankers cheques , demand Drafts and pay orders will only be valid for next 3 months from the date of issue. It will be expired and become invalid if you dont use it within limit period of 3 months. As of now this limit is 6 months , but from April 1 , 2012 this is going to change.
Reserve Bank of India said that this move was intended to stop the misuse of the six-month validity period by ‘some persons’ who were circulating such instruments in the market like cash.
The team at moneysights.com notified JagoInvestor this morning that beginning today, moneysights would offer their Online Investment Services completely free of charge. Earlier, the company was levying an Annual Account Servicing Fee of Rs. 490 & a per Purchase Transaction charge of Rs. 10 & 20 for SIP & Lumpsum respectively. But, as per the new structure, users would now not be paying anything to avail these services.
Commenting on this new development, Santosh Navlani, Co-founder – moneysights, added “Since the day we launched, we have receiving repeated comments from our users all over the country that they expected moneysights to be a cheaper alternative to existing options of investing online in Mutual Funds – not just in terms of the efforts required to buy & sell funds, but also in terms of pricing. After speaking to lots of users, we realized instead of making incremental changes to pricing, moneysights is better placed to offer these for free. With this new structure, we are confident that users would continue to shower their support, loyalty & affection that they have blessed us with, since the time we first launched earlier this year”.
Govt on Friday increased the PPF interest rates to 8.6% , which was 8% from very long time. Also the investments limit has been raised to 1 lac from the old 70,000 . This will be effective from Dec 1 , 2011 . Apart from this Post office saving rates are increase from 3.5% to 4% , KVP (Kisan Vikas Patra) has been discontinued from now.
Also, The maturity period for monthly income scheme and NSC has been cut to 5 years and interest rates hiked to 8.2 per cent and 8.4 per cent, respectively.
IRDA has come up with a guidelines applicable from Dec 1 , 2011, which is that now , all the pension products has to come wih maturity benefits clearly mentioned . Earlier there were pension products which had a indicative returns based on an illustration, but now it has to be very clear and to the point . With this new guidelines the old rule of “guarantee of minimum 4.5% return” will go away.
New pension guidelines will be applicable to both linked and non-linked plans. Read more at this article
Credit Information Bureau of India (Cibil) is planning to introduce credit scores on mobile phone directly . As of now one can get his credit scores only from CIBIL by paying a fee and sending a document to CIBIL. But now CIBIL wants to make sure the credit score reaches people as fast as possible and for this they are in talks with various service providers like Vodafone and Bharti Airtel.
“Mobile transactions would change the way the industry is functioning. That’s our next focus. That’s where the growth will happen. We will be able to give the credit report to customers on their mobile immediately. We are exploring this possibility,” said Arun Thukral, MD, Cibil.
RBI in its monetary policy for 2011-12, has deregulated the interest rates on saving bank accounts. Till now the saving bank interest rate was uniform across all the banks and was decided by RBI (it was 4%) , but now all the banks are free to provide an interest rate which they want. However there is a caveat. On any deposit of less than 1 lac, there will still be a uniform interest rate by all banks which will be decided by RBI, but on deposits more than 1 lacs, banks will have freedom to choose the interest rate they want to give.
Yes Bank has even upped their saving bank account rate to 6% , so if you keep your money in YES BANK saving bank account , you get 6% interest which will be computed on daily basis. This move is expected to bring lots of competition among banks and hence decrease their profitability too.
RBI today increased repo and reverse repo rate by .25% or 25 basis points. Repo rate now stands at 8.5% and reverse repo rate is at 7.5%. Repo rate is the rate at which banks borrow from RBI , which means that this extra .25% might be passed on to the end customer which will increase the home loan EMI’s and other EMI’s too.
In the last 18 months there has been several hikes in interest rates , which has pushed the rates by 5.25% from the bottom. This has increased a lot of pressure on those loan payers who were on fluctuating interest rates . Also RBI has pointed out that this might be one of the last leg of interest rate hikes and from here on the rates might decrease in long terms.