Peter The Planner

Tonight i suddenly feel like touching on this topic and share abit with my readers about hardship..haha..Well not as if i am going through a tough time now but just feel like it might benefits some of you who might be going through difficult period now.

Well in my opinion, problems are there to enable human being to improve and be more efficient and hardships are there to mould a person character. No problem is unsolvable and all problems come with a solution. Therefore knowing this theory will tell us that when you face a problem, so long you stay focus to deal with the root cause, you will find a solution to it.

However the problem with many of us these days is that we tend to give up easily and choose an easy route out. THEY ESCAPE! But do you think by escaping can solve anything? NOPE! It doesnt solve anything and in fact it might just make matters worse.

These people have slight character fault. They can’t take hardship in life and when it comes right on their face, they simply turn away and move to elsewhere to find comfort. In the bible, God has made things very difficult for Jobs and no matter what happens to Jobs, he still did not give up and keep believing that God has bigger plan for him. He has the faith.

It actually applies in our life too. When we have a hard time, we just need to have more faith in ourselves and believe that we can overcome it. If you take a look at the successful people around you, i can assure you that everyone of them had gone through hardship before and it was through those times that they emerged stronger and better. They have grown because of the hardship.

In simple term, if one were to escape from hardship, he/she has not grown. To be able to take care of a family, there are many sacrifices to be made and at most times, you are required to do things that you dont like. Its also a small form of hardship. So guess what happened after you have learnt to do the things you dont like, you simply become better at it right and you might start to love it right?

Just my two cent worth to share before i end my night.

Lately i was speaking to a lot of people on life insurance planning and i am glad that most of them took up my advice to insure themselves rather than putting money elsewhere. However on the flip side, my friends are all telling me that they have problems convincing their clients to take up life policies and in fact they can sell investments or saving plans much better.

Well to me, this issue is not new. Human beings are designed to hear things that they are interested in and as a result, they will buy what they are keen on. So therefore as a financial doctor to them, one has to find the ‘hot’ button in them and spur their needs out. In fact, i have this 10 reasons for people to buy insurance and i truly stand by it.

Top 10 reasons why insurance is a MUST-BUY products

1) It provides your family member IMMEDIATE financial relief.

2) It generates real assets for you to pay off the debts/bills while leaving your saving for your loved ones.

3) If you stay put throughout the plan, you will be the biggest winner

4) In the event of disability, its able to provide you with one lump sum of money for a person to adjust to new lifestyle

5) If you dont buy when you are healthy and young, it will just get more and more expensive and worse still, you cant even buy.

6) Unless you can guarantee that you wont die or suffer from illness, you must buy insurance

7) One thing that is guaranteed in life, that is DEATH.

If you think you can really plan your life well then why isnt buying insurance part of your plan?

9) Insurance payout is not meant for yourself at times. Its for those who depends alot on you.

10) Unless you have one lump sum of money set aside for death expenses or major illness expenses, if not i dont see what’s wrong with covering these risks  in advance via monthly installement

Well as you are reading these, please dont judge me and say that because of my occupation i said all of the above. Even if i am not in this trade, i am sure that your parents or friends who have went through certain difficult stage of their life would be telling you the same thing. For my job, i am just putting it into certain perspective for you to understand.

The above reasons may or may not appeal to you but it doesn’t matter because different folks different stroke. Hence that is as much as i can do to share but the final decision still lies on you =)

Folks,

I believed this topic has been quite popular among those people who has ever experienced or have friends/relatives who had contracted major illness before. The most popular question that people asked would be whether can they claim from insurance?

Well the question is easy to answer by just asking two questions: Have you bought a major illness plan and what stage of the major illness is the person in now? Very often people would have thought that they have bought one or two illness plan because their agent told them their saving plan got inlcuded. So often than not, these are the people who will end up with very low coverge because the nature of saving plan is not meant for coverage and its not for whole life. So even if major illness rider was added, its also for short term (20 or 25yr) Agent simply just add the major illness to make the plan looks attractive. Personally an average person coverage for major illness can range between $150k to $400k and whether they will get more really dependable on their income and how importance is major illness coverage worth to them.

Of course all agent will tell you that fact finding is very important and you should follow as accordingly to what you need but however to be realistic, we all have unlimited wants and limited resources. Until we can find more resources to fill up our needs, all things have a limit. So to me although a fact find is important but it is not the most important thing. The important issue is whether client has a comprehensive coverage first. Then from there, bit by bit i will increase their coverage accordingly to their affordibility.

Back to the second question that i would ask: What stage of the critical illness are you in? This is very important because for anyone who last purchased an illness plan was 2 years ago, i can quite certain to inform them that they are not covered if they ever diagnosed with early stage critical illness. For all the old trad or ILP, all the critical illness coverage definition must be in critical stage which means its stage 3 or 4 of cancer for example.

There was one newspaper article few years back that featured a woman who was diagnosed with early stage major illness but wasnt able to claim because her plan was meant for critical major illness coverage. Because of such issue, all insurance companies have came up a plan that specially catered for early stage illness and i STRONGLY urged everyone to upgrade a little bit to enhance your overall coverage. Typically such a plan would paid out 50% upon early stage and the maximum coverage can range from $100k to $150k. Imagine with $50k or $75k to treat your illness, you can go through all the treatments without worrying about the cost.

Therefore after reading this article, i urged you to dig out your policies and check with your adviser to ask if you can upgrade your illness coverage. Dont let them lead you to buy anything else. If you are not sure, you can always email me: peterlim_agent@yahoo.com.sg to ask and i will be happy to assist.

Take care and God bless you! Cheers =)

Hi guys!

It has been a superb long time since i last blogged and i really missed the old days where i regularly sat down to share my views with you guys =) Anyway to make things short and sweet, i shall highlight the main points of what has happened to me for the past 3 months.

- Went to few places in US for a two week holiday as part of incentive trips
- 2 week of reservist right after i touched down from airport -_-
- Ventured into renovation business with my ID
- Took up a bridal package with Venus and had just finished phototaking with them last friday!
- Took up a trainer job with MoneyTree to teach financial literacy to primary and secondary students
- Bought a $1800 mattress from OM (Im gonna make sure i sleep at least for 10 years)

Haha..it seem like i never really go out to meet clients -__- Yes indeed i have been resting awhile and i think its time to get back my business! Lately my company has launched many products that i feel that it’s gonna be so awesome because all these products can fill up the gaps that currently people are facing. Wonderful!

Anyway i told myself that i must start my blogging session from Nov onwards and i will make sure that i blog at least once per week and it must be something useful that my readers can take back. Anyway i like to take this chance to shout out ‘Thank you’ to those who has been following up my blog and encouraged me to blog more. Without your support, i wouldnt have the motivation to continue this site. 

Have a wonderful week ahead folks! Cheers

Do you trust the guy who do up your insurance portofolio?
Do you trust that he/she has the best interest for you?
Do you trust that you are getting the best out the the limited resources you  have?

When it comes to planning, i am a strong believer of trusting the person who is supposed to be an expert in the industry it’s in. When there is enough trust, alot of work can be lessen off and things can move fast. However due to human kind, some of us tend to abuse this trust and as a result, there are many others who had bad experience.

I would highly recommend that you as a consumer, need to assess your consultant inside out when it comes to financial planning for yourself. Make sure that this person is not out to earn a commision from you and what he say, he must do it himself too. If you meet an agent selling you ILP, do ask for proof of himself buying the plan too. I’m sure you dont want to buy from an agent who is insufficiently covered or worse still, doesnt even own this policy himself.

Ask him what are the type of planning he has done for himself? If he takes a second to think and tell you, it can only show that he/she is not sure of their planning and thinking of a good excuse to tell you.

Do you have a consultant who only sells you saving plan or recommend that you should start saving since young? Well not that the theory of saving since young is wrong but it’s just that if one commits too much into saving initially without fufilling the insurance coverage, the end result will only be one thing: Lapsed policy.

By lapsing, the customer is the biggest loser so that’s why i always advice my clients to tell their friends not to buy saving plan. Despite all that has been said, there are still many young people falling into the saving plan trap. Rich consultants are the one that selling you saving plan because they earn the most out of it. You hardly see them selling you term or limited pay plan because of the minimum commission.

In short i just hope to highlight to readers that trust is to be earned and not to be given so easily to your financial planer. Make sure that they are really keeping track of your insurance portfolio as a whole rather than always going for saving for long term approach.

Hellow folks!

It’s been almost 2 months since my last posts and i am deeply sorry about it. Many of my friends have asked me what happened and my reply was ‘No time’

But today i receieved an email which motivated me to want to blog more. I got an email from CPF board to invite me to write articles for their upcoming ‘Are you ready’ Campaign and i really feel very honoured to be on their invited list. They are going to launch this initiative in 9 Oct 2011 and the purpose aims to educate singaporeans on how to make key financial decisions in their lives.

So therefore the next few weeks, i am going to write a couple of articles so that they can use for the campaign and hopefully through this event, more people can be educated financially.

If you guys have any other topics or areas that you are interested to know more, you can email me or drop me a msg at the chatbox. i will listen to you and share with you my knowledge to my best ability =)

Stay tuned!

Today was another fufilling day for me as i get to speak to four people to participate in their financial journey =) Seriously i find so much satisfaction in sharing with people the importance of planning in life.

Just before i ended my day, i was having supper with my friend and we were on the topic of being successful in life. We were talking about people that we know that are successful and how other famous people who was successful would one day ended up screwing up everything. So we kinda concluded that some of them are actually building up on empty shell. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Hello my friends!

It’s been almost one whole month since i blogged to share with you about the recent happenings in my life. Where should i start? Let’s start with my renovations of my home then =)

Since the start of 2nd of May, my house has officially started renovation but then due to some delay, the hacking and demolition of walls can only be started in 9th May. Well it was really a tiring but fruitful two months before the whole thing kick starts. After this, i realised that doing up planning for the whole house was a very interesting things to be done between couples. Every single weekend was spent either with contractors or at furniture shops looking around for ideas and good deals.

Indeed you will get to see and discover your partner in a different light. It can be good or bad but i guess the most important thing is to compromise. Never insist on your idea onto something that both cannot see eye to eye. Jasmine and me made a good pair because she is quite easy going and she lets me to make most of the decisions. Seriously this solves many problems. Can you just imagine if you and your wife both wants to make decision on the type of dining table to buy, i can assured you that it will never end. Of course there are areas that i do according to what she likes =)

Currently into the last three weeks of the renovations and i am left with plastering, aircon piping, electricity, painting and carpentary works. I’m also done with all the furnitures, lighting and aircon. I pray that all things will go smoothly and no big issue will come out of the picture.

I’m also very thankful for my best friend, Daniel, for putting up with me over at their place. It was very nice of them to let me stay during this period of time. My other friend, Simon, was also very nice to me by allowing me to put my furnitures at his newly BTO flat without charging me a rental fee! I am really quite blessed =)

Despite all the busy schedules at home, i am still able to meet up my clients and new referrals to review thier plans and most of them have also gone ahead to upgrade their coverage after seeing thier shortfall. Though there are times that i fall short but they are still very understanding towards me. Some of them have also encouraged me by saying that my service to them has been very well and i am not pushy about my products to them. Hearing all these indeed makes me believe that quality business will only comes in when quality advice and service are being provided.

One more important updates was that i had already proposed to my gf who is now considered my fiancee =) Hahaha..i am still not used to use such term at times but i guess i am also getting used to it as days go by. Everything went well during the proposal and it was just a simple and sincere proposal. No nice roses or dinner as expected though =) We are now in the midst of praying for a good time to get married and hopefully we have an answer soon!

I’m approaching the second half of the year with much excitment and joy because there are just so many good things to be happy about and feel blessed. I have good friends with me, good career, good clients, good fiancee, good health and family relationship. I can’t help but feel that God is very nice to me and i will continue to grow deeper in relationship with HIM so that i can lead even a better life in future.

I believed all the readers will find this question very familiar. Either we have been asking ourselves every other day or by our family members who want us to get married and set up a family.

The important question is that in this current fast pacing society, can we still save? Is it easy to save?

I guess the answer to this is really a ‘Yes’. Personally i have two brothers and one likes to save and while the other likes to spend. Both have two children. I also have a sister who is a full time mother with one child and survives based on single income.

From them, i really learnt alot on how to stay happy even though income is not high. The secret to saving is not so much on how much you bring home but rather how you view money. To my sister, having able to save a couple of hundreds can be a great joy for her and she has great plans on how to spend wisely with it. However as compared to my brother, the excitment or joy is not as much. So you can see that with the same amount of dollars, different people react differently.

Therefore the moral of this sharing is to tell you that by simply changing your view towards the dollar notes can change the way you are feeling every day. Take one more example that is myself.

i derived joy from being able to save on cab/car by taking mrt even though i own a car now. Each day as i travel for apppointments by mrt, i feel happy because i have no worries towards ERP and CBD parking. Most importantly petrol costs. I enjoy eating simple food that doesnt need me to pay for GST and service charge. I love to shop when i travel to places like bangkok or malaysia because the things are so cheap and it serves the same purpose. 

Maybe some of you may find that is it worthwhile saving that small amount of money or is it neccesary to be so ‘poor’ when you can well afford luxury items? To me, it is worthwhile because i hold on to this belief: The only thing in this world that will make you happy is FREE! Eg: Happiness, Air or appreciation of what we have. The person that tells you that buying the most expensive item will make you happy is bluffing you!

Isn’t it true? When we purchase a car, we will get concerned if we need to service or pay for all the expensive erp charges. When we purchase an ideal condo, are we not worried about the maintenances of the monthly instalment? When you buy your favourite LV bag, are you only happy when people notice? Please don’t tell me you feel happy to just own it and not want people to see or appreciate. If there is really the case, you should consider hugging it to sleep. At least it serves some purposes than collecting dust at home.

Therefore i hope that after reading this, you can start to change how you see money and from there, you will slowly find joy in saving money. It is never too late to save because at whatever age you are(as long as you are still working) , you have the rest of your life to save up! =)

Happy Saving!

More and more people are aware of the NEED TO BUY INSURANCE first! =) I’m so happy to be always meeting people who likes to put their priority as protecting their wealth rather than accumulating. This makes my job really much easier and more meaningful.

So what are the top few concerns that most people have? Below are my own findings so please don’t judge me =)

1) Hospitalisation Bill
2) Major Illness coverage
3) Accidental Death
4) Death
5) Disability

As you can see, most people are very much concerned with regards to the medical costs in Spore and the kind of medical treatment they will receive if they are diagnosed with one of the 30 major illness. With such a simple statistic. i can happily conclude that it does not required a whole lot of money to address all the top 3 concerns for most people. As a matter of fact, i would think that a few plans of less than $100/mth would be able to comfortably address the top 3 issues facing some of the singaporeans.  So stop buying plans from agent who keep pushing saving plan to you and tell you all sort of ‘reasons’ to buy them. 

Start small and cover at least $100,000 for major illness, accident death and hospital. Any upgrade, you can always do it at a much later part.