Help at hand to manage your MFs

I have always found it tough to to keep track of my Mutual Fund investments not that there are too many , but the fact that i have them with different AMC http://www.amfiindia.com/ means that i would need to login into different websites to keep track.

This is where http://www.camsonline.com/ comes in handy. CAMS is a back office services provider for many of India's leading AMC and if you take care to mention your email address , when you apply for any of MFs, from the CAMS online site it is possible to get a detailed holding of all your MF(across AMC, across folios) through a single email , either as a secure attachment or as a link.I feel this an extremely useful feature.

LIC's licindia.com

Of all the public sector insurance companies , the website hosted by LIC is something which totally surpised me( for a change, pleasantly). I could only wish all other public sector insurance companies could only take clue from LIC , to change, the way they use internet .

On this LIC site we can not only pay our premiums but can view our previously paid premiums.This may not seem as much , but considering the alternative where you may have to try to get to a LIC office which kind of opens at 10 AM it is a luxury.

I have a National Insurance , Mediclaim policy , it is nightmare to get this renewed each year and wish each year when the time comes for its renewed that National Insurance ( which is currently seems to be spending a lot of money on print Ads ) just changes its pre historic website and help me renew my policy ( but unfortuantely this is just a dream for now )

If you have not tried this feature , would strongly recommend that you try this and i'am sure that paying LIC premiums would be a breeze

Why do people do not invest in PPF

I would consider PPF as one of the finest avenues of investment , especially as one of the strategies to achieving your retirement planing goals along with any pension plans,MFs and direct exposure to stocks that you may have

I have spoken to quite a lot of people about this and found these are reasons that people generally have avoided or do not have a PPF account

Do not even know there exits something called PPF
People know that compounding is an amazing way to make your money work harder , they know it is something which works wonders when seen from an long term prespecive.Yet you ask them about instruments available in India , which will allow them to compound their investment , you will suddenly encounter a silence.

Money gets locked in for 15 Years
This true ,yes of course you can avail loans and all those , but I would believe for real benefit of PPF to be availed , you would need to let the money be there for 15 years. and if you look at PPF as part of your retirement strategy , you would not feel that lock-in of 15 years is a disadvantage , but rather something that just help you accumulate your retirement nest.

Government can change the Interest rate any time
This true , PPF interest rates have changed from the time I had opened my PPF account . but times have changed , it is the age of coalition government and end of single party rule and hence would consider that going forward , it would not be so easy for governments to tamper with PPF interest.So may be we start taking advantage of these uncertain political times to build our PPF account.

So would recommend that your open up your PPF account today , if you still do not have one and if you do have one start maximizing your contribution towards your PPF. unlike a ULIP , which hugely rewards the agents there are no such incentives for an PPF agent , hence this product is rarely recommended or aggressively promoted

What this Blog is all about

I would like to use this blog to introduce you to things that worked for me in my personal finance planning and share with you all my thoughts. I always believe that knowledge needs to be shared and this would be my way of sharing my knowledge