The Insurance Site

For people searching for ways to save for retirement, aside from 401k plan or an IRA may opt to invest in an annuity. The term annuity provides all the benefits of a taxed-deferred growth as well as professional money management. It may be fixed, meaning, the investor will receive a guaranteed variable or a rate of return that introduces an investment risk element as well as the possibility of greater returns.

Basically, an annuity is a means or a financial instrument which is sold by many insurance companies where the purchaser of the annuity, better known as annuitant, offers regular payments to the prior company over a span of time referred to as accumulation period. This accumulation period can last for long even until the annuitant reaches his or her retirement age. If the said product is a variable annuity, the prior company invests the amount to a separate account that is composed of securities-based vehicles such as mutual funds.

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With the escalating cost of repairs to cars, it has become vital that every car owner invest in car insurance of some description. With this increased demand, the complexity of policies has also increased dramatically. If you do not know what you are reading, you can end up signing up for more insurance at a higher cost than you actually need. IN order to combat this, there are a number of ways for you to lower your risk profile and get cheaper car insurance

One of the primary considerations is your driving record. If you have comparatively few speeding fines and other violations on your record, you are viewed as a safe driver. People who have had their driving license for more than a certain period of time also get cheaper car insurance as they are considered to have achieved a level of expertise. Read more…

Get a Traffic Ticket? 6 Tips to Help Keep Your Rates Down

You’ve been busted. Maybe you were speeding. Maybe you didn’t come to a complete stop before making that right turn. Either way, it’s going to cost you.

You already have to pay the ticket. But is it possible to keep your car insurance premiums from going up as well? After all, each driver’s rates are assessed based on their driving record, and now you no longer have a “clean” record.

Here Are Five Ways to Help Minimize the Impact

1. Stick It Out with the Same Company

Loyalty is valuable in an age with so many options. It’s easy for customers to cancel a policy and take their business elsewhere. If you’ve been with the same company for a long time, a rate hike may be offset by accumulated discounts.

Insurance providers don’t raise rates after a ticket as punishment. Drivers who get t

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Meerkats, opera singers and karaoke-singing cartoons have invaded homes across the UK in recent years, thanks to one financial phenomenon:  insurance price comparison websites.

Moneysupermarket, Confused.com, BeatthatQuote, GoCompare and MoneyExpert have become household names with prominent advertising campaigns running on primetime TV and radio. Even supermarket giant Tesco and, more recently, Google, are in on the act of comparing financial products from insurance to credit cards. Supposedly, it’s all in the name of consumer convenience, but do they always offer the best deal?

How price comparison websites work

Before price comparisons websites burst on to the scene more than a decade ago, buying insurance was a laborious process that required hours of calls to different insurers and brokers in search of a saving. In

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The Tata Group today said it is studying the decision of its insurance partner AIG to sell the Asian operations to British insurance major Prudential. The Tata Group has a joint venture with the now bankrupt American Insurance Group (AIG) for both life as well as non-life insurance businesses, in which AIG holds 26 per cent stake.

“Any comment will be made post-studying the statement made by AIG in the US. For Tata AIG, it’s business as usual,” a Tata Group spokesperson told PTI. Prudential, which would acquire the Asian operations of the AIG (AIA) is already present in the country’s life insurance space as ICICI Prudential Life, a 26:74 joint venture between Prudential and the country”s largest private sector lender,ICICI Bank.

As per the norms, an insurance player cannot hold stakes in two insurance firms in the country. Therefore, Prudential cannot have stake in Tata AIG Life. Read more…

Australian cedants hoping for lower reinsurance costs from July 1 could be disappointed, with Munich Re expecting a “stable price” in the region’s key renewals period.

The country has once again made a significant impact on Munich Re’s claims expenditure, with January’s Queensland floods causing a loss “in the mid-double-digit million euro range”, according to the company’s first-quarter results.

However, the Asia-Pacific region provides “profitable growth opportunities”, CFO Jorg Schneider says.

There may be “slight price erosion” for natural catastrophe covers in the US from July 1 because of growing capacity, while prices “moved sideways” at the April 1 renewals.

For more on Munich Re’s first-quarter results, see INTERNATIONAL

Adolescents are just as likely to consume too many calories at Subway as at McDonalds, a new study in Journal of Adolescent Health finds, despite the fact that they think Subway offers healthier food.

Adolescents purchase about 1,000 calories worth of food for an afternoon meal at both fast food restaurants—150 calories more per meal than the Institute of Medicine recommends for this age group.

“We were interested in looking at how the restaurant marketing environment affects what adolescents purchase,” said Lenard Lesser, M.D., the studys lead author and a family physician and researcher at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute. Lesser and his colleagues asked adolescents where they would go for an unhealthy meal and for a healthy meal. “When we asked them where they would go for a healthy meal, most of them said Subway,” Lesser said. “

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