Insurance

Those well informed about insurance will tell you: “Insurance is sold, not bought.” For the lay Indian customer today, it is a reality that bites hard. How does he make sense of the information that comes out of the loud din of sales pitches? Long used to limited insurance offerings by public sector monopoly players, the opening up of the insurance sector seven years back has exposed him to a deluge of new and, in many cases, complicated products. Every insurance agent tells him that his company’s policy is the best. How does he figure out the best insurance covers for himself? With awareness about insurance itself still low and in the absence of objective, affordable and quality advisory services, the buyer has to pretty much fend for himself in this jungle. It is in this backdrop that in this special issue on insurance, we begin an annual feature of providing information about the best insurance policies. This latest effort is in line with our endeavour to set the reforms agenda in the space of personal finance to help our readers.

Many of us know that term life insurance plans provide life cover at the lowest cost. In this issue, we tell you how they work and how to buy them. Most importantly, we list the plans with the lowest premiums. While term plans have the virtue of minimising your premium obligations even as your family is ensconced in a large life cover, there are many who, for reasons ranging from dearth of time to lesser familiarity with investment products, prefer to use life insurance as an investment tool too. The recent past has seen numerous launches of unit-linked plans (Ulips) that offer transparency, flexibility and growth possibilities and have become popular. How do you find out which Ulips are the best? In this issue, we present the findings of our path-breaking research to rank a major category of Ulips, an exercise we hope to expand in the future to cover all Ulips. We tell you how to buy the best pension and kids’ Ulips and give essential information on their returns and costs.