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Hey, I'm not into fashion designing. But could not resist a tantalising title to talk about Insurance!! If you haven't started a family, an Insurance cover is the least of your priorities. But even though it's not that cool to be insured, it sure is smart when there are people who depend on you.

Life insurance is a potent tool that not only offers the ability to plan for unforseen events that can affect the family's financial situation adversely, but is also looked up to as an important tax saving cum investment tool.

One needs to do a certain amount of spade work before purchasing a policy, to ensure the best possible coverage at the right price. Here are some helpful tips to get you started:

Explore As premiums vary widely from company to company and cover to cover, it’s important to look around. One can try internet sites to get instant quotes.

Plot your value The key to purchasing the right amount of life insurance is to have just enough coverage to meet your needs. If you have more life insurance than you need, you'll be paying unnecessarily for higher premiums. On the other hand, it's important not to have too little coverage, resulting in you being underinsured.

Health matters the most Healthy people get better rates on life insurance. Higher premiums are quoted for anything that poses a risk for longer life expectancy (smoking, on regular medication, etc). Sooner the better As premium rise with increasing age, the younger you are when you purchase life insurance, the lower premiums you will be required to pay.

Review your cover periodically Any life change indicates the need for an overall review of the financial plans. Make sure you have enough cover for all important events of life.

Focus on annual installments You may not realize it, but you may be paying more for your life insurance if you pay your premium in monthly installments. Many insurance companies charge extra fees if you make monthly premium payments instead of paying the annual premium.

Never conceal facts Though, age and negative health related conditions attract higher premium, don’t think about lying on the insurance application. If your insurance company gets the knowledge of concealed facts they can terminate the cover.

Fundamentals of Exchange Traded Funds

Basically, ETFs are open-ended index fund that can also be traded on the stock market.

Compared to Mutual funds, there are many advantages of ETFs, one is real time pricing, secondly long term investors are protected from short term traders. Hence it proves to be an ideal instrument for both long term as well as short term investors and also it is easy to buy and sell from the exchange. One major disadvantage of ETF is that the investor should have a demat account and a broking account.

There are two types of advantages over index funds - one is the expense ratio which is currently lower in ETFs as compared to normal index funds. The second advantage is the distribution costs- the other index funds have to pay trail commission to the broker, while ETF does not pay the same. So the ETF cost will be lower.

In addition to the above-mentioned expenses, there also exist some `hidden' costs like transaction costs. Such costs do not form a part of the expense ratio like brokerage and STT. The transaction costs however, are incurred by index funds but not by ETFs. This is another area where ETFs score over regular index funds.

ETFs don't incentivise their product, which other regular mutual funds can do, hence there is no one pushing it.

But internationally what has happened that over a period of time people have found out that ETFs are ideal instruments and it has become more popular.

Just to give an example - in the last three month if you look at the Nifty BeES, among all forty funds it was ranked 11th in the down market, which clearly shows that the ETFs/index funds are working.