Over the past few weeks, I have been working to understand the experience in buying various financial products – from a simple savings bank account to a mutual fund, insurance, ULIP, post office schemes, real estate and stocks.
I have had some experiences by myself. I have heard from my friends, family and colleagues too.
Some have had harrowing experiences, almost like an ordeal. Most experiences though were a mixed bag – different for different products.
But today I want to listen to your voice.
What has been your experience? The good, the bad and the ugly, all of it.
And there is a purpose behind it.
We got to make financial decisions better and products simpler, faster, smoother and convenient. Your answers will lead to understanding to build the change that we all want.
Do you want to talk about this?
You may choose to ignore this. I firmly believe your participation will go a long way in creating the change.
Be a part of the change.
Here are a few questions that you can use as cues to write your feedback.
- How easy or difficult has it been to understand the various products that you have?
- Where do you buy your various financial products from?
- Have you ever been mis-sold any product? (you were sold something, that didn’t fit your needs or you understood very little about)
- What is the best part of dealing with your service provider?
- What is the worst part of dealing with your service provider?
- Do you use online platforms? How do you come to trust them?
- What experience do you want to have / feel in buying financial products?
I keenly look forward to your answers. You may just hit reply or use the comments section.
As always, I am grateful.
-> How easy or difficult has it been to understand the various products that you have?
For starters, it is very difficult to get right information from the right source. Personally when I started gaining knowledge about different products, I spent lots of time reading blogs.
Sometimes, two bloggers also conflicts in their opinions so for a reader becomes more difficult to decide whom to trust.
Some bloggers gives false information to reader just to gain traffic and money 🙂 with heading ‘top 5 mutual funds to invest in 2015’.
-> Where do you buy your various financial products from?
PPF – from bank offline mode
Mutual Funds – Online directly from AMC website
Have you ever been mis-sold any product? (you were sold something, that didn’t fit your needs or you understood very little about)
At starting of carrier and investment knowledge, I was told by one of my relative (no guesses, he is LIC agent), that being a good salary person,
I should start investing (he used the word ‘investing’, instead of ‘insuring) in LIC policies. Also, the main benefit he told me was the
lump-sum amount and some exaggerated bonus, obviously I felt into this trap and purchased few different policies (like the was purchase different mutual funds 🙂 ), well after two years,
I stopped paying towards them.
-> What is the best part of dealing with your service provider?
Since I am investing directly with AMC, I have the flexibility to do it on my own choice and that too in direct plans.
-> What is the worst part of dealing with your service provider?
Need to maintain excels sheet to track data from different AMCs and need to manually do calculations to get XIRR.
-> Do you use online platforms? How do you come to trust them?
Currently using Perfios, well, being a software engineer, I knew about website security, authentication process, encryption/decryption, so by studying all these factors,
I trusted them.
-> What experience do you want to have / feel in buying financial products?
A single platform wherein I can have flexibility to buy/redeem direct plans. Apart from MFs, if other products becomes available (may be not for purchase but to track)
then it will be added benefits. Purchase guide will be one thing I will look for. The data analysis of MFs like we do it offline using Valuereasearchonline dump.
On this dump we them manually apply different filters to get the right data. If the online platform could help in doing this, then that would be big benefit. Report generation capability. Last but not least, the platform’s main goal should not be to generate traffic to get money (this can be their secondary goal 😉 )
Hi Umesh,
Thank you so much for the comment. It can almost be an article by itself. 🙂
Very brave as well as humble of you to recognise several areas of improvements. Personally, I believe, you have already set yourself on the path of great financial success.
All the best!
PS: I have noted several points you have mentioned.
Hi vipin,
Just started investing..I have an account with FundsIndia, .. Not sure if it is the best. ..I’ve invested only a small amount in Mutual Funds so far. Im given option to talk with my finance assistant.. But not sure how good that person is.
regarding Mutual funds and other investment options – it is difficult to understand the statistics and graphs, with different technical terms.And to keep track of their performance, and what are the experts opinions on how they’ll be performing in the future.
Hi Sreenviasan, I understand your pain. Believe me I have been through it myself.
The only redeeming idea is to invest in your own learning. Over time, that should equip you to evaluate various options and make better decisions.
Keep asking questions. 🙂