Kavitha Menon's Blog

Kavitha Menon |  Disability, partial or complete, due to accident or illness, makes it impossible for a person to continue earning as he or she did before the unfortunate accident or illness. In financial planning lingo, both death and disability mean loss of income. This loss of income needs to be covered using insurance. While most do have life cover, we cannot be completely assured of our families' financial safety without a complete disability cover. How much disability cover do we need? A cover equivalent to life cover is needed. The product should give a lumpsum amount, equivalent to sum assured, should one be unable to work productively in case of a physical or mental disability. Surprisingly there seems to be a huge lacuna in the product offerings from insurance companies in this space. Not only is there a lacuna there is also a lot of confusion on what such a product would offer. Disability insurance is not the same as accident cover. An accident cover protects again...

Schemes that invest a part or whole of their corpus ,either directly or through overseas investments funds ,in securities of companies listed abroad are called international funds. There are many variants within International Funds. At the most basic level there are schemes with over 65% in Indian equities. These are classified as equity schemes and taxed accordingly, while those with less than 65% in Indian equities are classified as non-equity and hence taxed on the same lines as debt schemes. Further more schemes in this space can be either direct equity schemes or FOF (Fund of Funds). FOFs are typically more expensive structures than regular funds as the investor pays fees/expenses to both the FOF manager as well as to the schemes that form part of the portfolio. Many schemes are also sector specific. They may invest in only commodity or bullion funds that invest in overseas markets. Thus a AIG World Gold or DSP World Gold fund invests your money in schemes floated by their parents...