Author: Brent Bray

The best way to lead a peaceful retired life is to have sufficient income that allows you to live an adequate lifestyle and be able to meet any emergencies that might arise. The traditional approach to retirement planning has been to choose low-risk and low-return long-term investments. Some of the aforementioned investments have lock-in periods that make switching to more profitable avenues difficult. Moreover, most investment avenues do not provide substantial relief in case of an unfortunate event like the death of the investor. In this context, a savings insurance plan is a cost-effective investment tool to ensure protection for your family and get a regular stream of income in your old age.What is a guaranteed income plan? As you move ahead in life, your needs change according to th...

Small business owners aren’t accountants by profession. More often than not, they are not even from finance backgrounds. However, whatever their area of expertise may be, they need to learn the ins and outs of accounting. Manual accounting goes as far as you are a small business operating with limited capability. But as soon as you think of scaling up, accounting tasks will seem a lot more daunting if you are not prepared for them. In such scenarios, small business accounting software is helpful to manage all the accounting-related activities. But beyond that, there are some habits you should inculcate in yourself to be able to make the most out of the small business accounting software. Let’s look at five such factors that you should keep in mind about accounting to develop healthy accoun...

The exchange of money from one currency to another occurs every minute of every day among banks, institutions and individuals. Therefore, making a wire transfer should be straightforward - you select the service provider, request the transfer, and provide the required information. While wire transfers have become more efficient with the advancement of technology, they still have an unsettling element of hidden costs and surprises. The answer to this mystery cost lies in a concept few have heard of - middle-market rates, better known as mid-market rates. The process of transferring money involves the sale of one currency to buy another at a defined exchange rate: the value of one currency against the other. Exchange rates fluctuate rapidly, and it's important to understand this rate because...

ECS or Electronic Clearing Service allows for funds to be transferred from one bank account to another. Institutions often take advantage of ECS as it allows for various payments to be made with ease. These payments range from the distribution of interest and the payment of salaries to the allocation of pension and more. You can also use ECS to pay a number of bills including those pertaining to but not limited to your -telephone usage water consumption electricity equated monthly installments (or EMIs) SIP investmentsECS allows you to conduct credit and debit transactions with ease.Understanding the ECS Mandate Form Should you want to activate ECS transactions, you need to inform your bank of the same with the aid of an ECS mandate form that gives authorization ...

In this article let’s first understand what is a Demat and 3 in 1 account. Let’s begin with a Demat account. Remember the times when we had to rely on a bunch of papers while investing in the stock market? Every time, while buying or selling shares, new documents/papers kept on adding up. This created a lot of hassle and we had put more effort into organizing and securing the documents. To overcome this issue, the concept of a Demat account was introduced in India by the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) in 1996. Demat account stands for a Dematerialized account. NSDL is a depository institution that holds our security assets or helps us in trading them through a Depository Participant (DP). DPs are brokerage firms or banks that get a license from the NSDL to work as DP. DP i...