Start Investing With Only $500 — Her World
Quite glad that an article I have been helping a writer with has finally been published. The November 2014 issue of Her World carries the article Start Investing With Only $500, and I am pleased that it even found a little spot on the cover page.
I also realised that it is quite challenging to write an article for a magazine, and also very different from writing on this blog where I have full editorial control. The article would have been quite different if I wrote it from scratch, but I suppose the end product is more fitting for a magazine. (You can view the article at the end of this post.)
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Fat Fitness Trainers and Poor Financial Advisers
A friend tweeted something one day, and it was along the lines of him not understanding the concept of a fat fitness trainer and the idea of a poor financial adviser. It is seemingly logical and I suppose most people would agree quite readily, but I couldn’t help but cringe at the rather misguided view.
A fitness trainer must be fit himself in order to be able to help his trainees become fit, right? Therefore, shouldn’t a financial adviser be wealthy in order to help his clients become rich?
Eating One’s Own Dog Food
I came across this video and somehow got reminded of a phenomenon that occurs with insurance agents. The video shows a man — who identifies himself as a Senior Brand Manager of a vacuum cleaner company — cleaning an area of the dirty floor of a subway station with his vacuum cleaner before spilling food over it and eating the pieces off the ground. He then proclaims his upmost faith in his product’s effectiveness.
“Eating one’s own dog food’’ describes what he has just did. The phrase refers to a situation in which someone uses their own product to demonstrate the quality of it and their own personal conviction in their product. Such a practice is actually quite prevalent with insurance agents.
Insurance firms must be made to justify higher premiums: TODAY voices
A reader of TODAY wrote in to the publication regarding his thoughts about the increase in insurance premiums:
I see two current issues regarding insurance that impact cost of living. One is the wide range of premiums for health insurance offering similar hospitalisation coverage and the ability of insurers to hike premiums by a large quantum upon renewal.
He is quite astute to note that the cost of insurance policies does impact cost of living — significantly so, I might add. I get this feeling that most Singaporeans do not seem to notice this fact at all, seemingly buying policies without much thought or research, perhaps out of a misplaced trust in the person selling them these policies. When it comes to increasing food prices or transport fares, the same people are understandably upset at the rising costs of living, but they seem oblivious to the fact that a bad insurance portfolio can cost them so much more over their lifetimes.