Welcome to the era of negative interest rates

Don't be surprised when one day, you realise that the bank will charge you interest (instead of paying you interest, in common sense) for the money you deposit with them.

This has already gone real in certain financial institution in the USA and in Europe. Even some new bonds recently issued by the government of some countries in those regions are having negative interest rate.

Well, when a financial institution impose a negative interest rate, it sends a clear message to its depositors to withdraw their money from that institution and deposit to other competitors who still offering normal positive interest rates, or to use the money for consumption or invest in other kind of investment instruments that might not be as safe as the money market but also provide higher potential of growth to the money, or to keep the money at home in your personal safe.

Why a financial institution wants to force you to withdraw your money from them? Probably because they have too much idle cash on hand, and the investment situation is really bad, and the interest rate is really low (in low interest situation, their profit margin to lend out the money is low).

No matter how, be prepared for the day to come to you.

Your smartphone will be your personal assistant: Apple Siri & Google Now

A few years ago, Apple acquired Siri, and this artificial intelligence (AI) product is now part of the iPhone 4S launched last October 2011. It includes functionalities to make it a virtual personal assistant that we always bring along.

Recently when Google announced the next version of Android, Jelly Bean, they promised us with  Google Now, which is a search-centric, voice-powered digital AI personal assistant to compete with Siri.

We can anticipate one more interesting function in our smartphone in near future, which is a personal assistant who knows about our time schedule and proactively alert/remind us on upcoming appointments, and knows our interest and hobby and provide useful suggestion/answer that match with our interest.

It will also learn the detail in the air-ticket that we purchased, and able to kept us updated with boarding information, latest departual/arrival time schedule, the weather at the destination, etc.

It will be able to remind us about the birthday and anniversary of our family members and close friends.

When we are on the road, it will alert us on possible traffic jam ahead, and suggest for alternative route.

Nowadays, a smartphone is already very much more than a phone that we use to make call and send SMS. The revolution will continue with more and more features and functionalities added in.

New type of insurance plan to get early payout for 36 critical illnesses

If you have bought an insurance plan, or have been approached by insurance agent before, I'm sure you might have been known about the kind of health/medical insurance that covers 36 kinds of critical illnesses.

However, you might not be awared that the coverage on the 36 kinds of critical illnesses is at the terminal stage, which is a serious stage that is hard to recover or already close to death. Before reaching such a serious situation, although you might unluckily caught by one of the 36 kinds of critical illnesses, you still can't make any claim from your critical illnesses insurance policy.

Recently, I was informed by my insurance agent about a new type of insurance plan (well, actually not that new now as it has been launched for quite some times) that can complement the traditional 36 critical illnesses insurance plan with an early payout condition.

Under this early payout for critical illnesses plan, we can make the claim upon early diagnosis of a critical illness covered under the plan, and make use of the money for medical treatment. Early treatment let us have higher chance of survival.

The payout will be a certain proportion of the total sum insured, depends on the type of the diagnosed illness and its severity level (early, intermediate, terminal). Multiple claims across multiple critical illnesses is possible as long as there is still balance in the total sum insured.

Anyhow, this kind of early payout insurance plan seems to be come as a rider in a regular premium investment-linked insurance plan, making it not so flexible for people who want to take this kind of insurance but not so interested in buying unit trust through insurance (which normally incurs high commission rate and high admin charges).

Do contact with your own insurance agent to find out more about such early payout critical illnesses insurance plan if you are interested.