Advice to young people on financial planning

A young man, who just started working, was approached  by a friend who is an insurance agent. The young man already had SAF insurance. The agent told him, "The SAF insurance will expire at age 65. Where can you get life insurance after that? It is better to buy a life insurance policy now to supplement the SAF insurance".

The agent is giving bad advice and is misleading the young man.

Beyond age 65, there is no need for life insurance. The young man would have become an old man with grown up children (who do not depend on him) and would have accumulated sufficient savings to last for a lifetime. There is no need for people to have life insurance when they are old.

If he buys a life insurance policy, the consequences are likely to be:

• The agent would have taken away more than one year of his hard earned savings
• The cash value of the policy at age 65 would be quite low, giving a yield of perhaps 2% per annum
• The policy will continue to be a burden to the policyholder.
• The policy could have taken away more than $100,000 of his savings by age 65 (see "effect of deduction").

My advice to all young people, male and female, is to avoid locking up your future savings in a life insurance policy that gives you a poor return. Here are the ways to avoid this trap:

• Read my book, Practical Guide on Financial Planning, available for $12 here.
• Join FISCA and attend the educational talks
• Read the FAQs in my website. It's FREE.
• Avoid people trying to market life insurance or investment products to you. Here's why.

If you agree with my views, please pass the link to this article to all of your friends, so that they can avoid falling in the same trap. Send e-mail or go through Facebook and other social media.

Tan Kin Lian

PDF centric website [2]

I made a deliberate decision to pursue a document-centric websites. Some people, who are used to the traditional HTML design, disagree with my approach and argue that search engines cannot find the keywords in the documents. (Some of these critics make a living by designing website on the traditional HTML approach).

I am aware of this perceived disadvantage of the PDF design, but it is inconsequential. If a reader search for the word "insurance", he will get millions of links. Do you expect your HTML webpage with the word "insurance" to appear on the top page?

The webpages that appear at the top are from people who pays Google a few dollars per click. The buying rate could be less than 1% of clicks, so the cost of this type of advertising is very high.

If you search for "Tan Kin Lian", you will get to my website anyway. I do not expect people to come to my website through the keywords of "insurance", "investment", "property" or other generic words.

There are several advantages of the PDF centric website. It is easy for the reader to download a PDF containing the FAQs. The PDF can be read offline, printed or mailed to other people. This advantage far overwhelm the disadvantage of "missing the search engine".

I invite innovative enterprises to build the PDF centric website as a second website for your organisation. You do not have to dump the current website. Have two websites and see which attracts more visitors. You can read the PDF centric website here.

Tan Kin Lian

Subsidised dating

Read this story.

My view
I am very sad to read about the millions of dollars that are being wasted pursuing wrong strategies, e.g. subsidise dating. The underlying problems are the high cost of living and the burden of national service on young Singaporean males. This has been evident for many years and are getting worse as time goes by. But the government refuses to recognize the root causes and continue to pursue the ineffective strategies.

Customer Service

I wish to share my experience in building excellent customer service in an enterprise that I headed in the past. It uses an effective strategy that is backed by a good system, infrastructure and well trained employees.

Read
http://tankinlian.com/admin/file.aspx?id=140

Look for Customer Service in
http://www.tankinlian.com/Information.aspx?CatID=1

Legal Office Supplies

Legal office supplies can prove to be an expensive overhead in any legal practice.If you don't choose products such as legal binders, legal paper, document management software, law office billing software well you will incur unnecessary and costly overheads which will drag your bottom line at the end of the year.

This is without considering more specialist legal office supplies such as transcription software which is practically essential in all law offices now to ensure maximum return on the time of the busy attorney..dictating correspondence and other secretarial tasks such as memos when on the move can really ensure that the busy attorney is doing what he does best-reading files and giving legal advice of benefit to his/her clients.

Legal Document Software | Law Office Software

Legal document software can prove to be of major benefit to the progressive law office concerned with greater efficiencies, cost reduction and avoiding expensive litigation from unhappy clients.
The total compliance with the various regulatory bodies which oversee the practice of law in your state is also assisted by the astute use of law office software.

YOG in perspective

Here is a message from my friend.