Do you take on debt as a speculative action or for a lifestyle you cant support?

Sumeet: It’s a regular question. It tells us about the mind-set of the family. Are they trying to live outside their means by borrowing money? Are they trying to indulge in speculative activities like buying stocks by taking up loans? All this is a definite no-no. If we figure out that the family indulges in such behavior, we try and get them out of it

Do you set aside money for your retirement?

Sumeet: In India people do have a clear idea of when they want to retire. When the question comes to setting aside the money, it is usually ‘Yes, we have set aside a basket of money but not definitely for retirement or any other goal.’ That’s a problem because if you are saving without any defined goal, there is a possibility that you will use your emotion to decide where to spend the money.

Do you have a detailed written Will? Why is the Will important?

Sumeet: A Will is the most important document irrespective of whether you have money or not. What a Will  really does is leave a written legacy to try and pass on whatever intellectual, financial assets you have created, over to your next generation in a seamless manner. In India, a Will is a very emotional subject. When you talk of a Will, people take it as if they are talking about when will they die … people should understand that a Will has to be done for it to be a smooth affair for their family after their death.

Are all of your investments or bank accounts in joint names? Why is it important for these accounts to be joint accounts?

Sumeet: You have to be prepared for any eventuality in life. When something happens to an individual, what will happen to all the bank accounts in his individual name? It will then go through a very cumbersome legal procedure in which the Court will decide and give a judgement on who is to take care of that money. This just create problems unnecessarily. So you must have joint accounts or atleast have a nominee for all your accounts.

Who should be the nominee of the joint account?

Sumeet: It depends on your comfort level. By first level, we recommend the nominee be family. Sometimes, it could be very, very close friends. Then, distant relatives like brothers-in-law. But the idea is to create a scenario if something happens to someone, the money which is meant for certain things goes to those certain things.

Do you have a Power of Attorney to operate your bank accounts if they aren’t joint?

Sumeet: Power of Attorney is a legal document which gives the right to operate those accounts in certain circumstances. This helps in articulating and managing the risks in case something happens.

Sumeet, what is the average response to all of these questions?

Sumeet: It’s very, very poor. Most of the time investment is a subject which gets taken care of but till date, we have rarely found a family which is above average. If somebody scores above 30, it’s great. But we have rarely found one or two families with that kind of  a score. Most of them are between 10 to 20 which is very, very poor.

But it is very important to do this check up because it will tell you the state of your finances.

The following is an excerpt of our conversation.

Sumeet, I have a list of questions here. Lets get started.

The first question on the list is ‘Have you prepared a budget for your household expenses?’ Why is that important to know?

Sumeet: The starting point is to try and understand the old saying in financial planning – “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”  It is important to know if the family has a budget and if yes,  then are they following the budget or not

What is your monthly household expenditure?

Sumeet: Before I dive into this question, I specifically ask my client – what is your understanding of savings? Savings is Income (minus) Expenses. So what we are trying to ascertain when we are getting into your budgeting questions is (a) do we prepare a budget for you, and (b) if you prepare the budget, do you know what your expenses are? Because that will help us determine whether you have any savings potential. We understand all this by understanding what is your household expenditure

Do you have ready cash in case you lose your job?

Sumeet: It talks about the discipline of the family. It talks about how do you go about planning your monthly expenses, maintaining the discipline within family saving, expenses etc

Have you taken a life insurance cover?

Sumeet: Life insurance cover in India is a very misunderstood concept. People use the term ‘invest in life insurance.’ You don’t invest in life insurance, you buy life insurance.

Have you taken up health insurance for your family?

Sumeet: Usually the focus in this question is on the family because when we do financial planning, the focus is on the entire family rather than just an individual. So the question is whether the whole family is covered. Most of the time, the answer is in the affirmative from Corporate employees because most companies provide this as a perk. Even then, most of the times it’s not for the family, it’s only for the individual employed. And many a time, people end up buying family floaters or some kind of a medical insurance. We ask this question to get into ‘how much is that’?

Is your home or business insured against disasters? Tell us about this…

Sumeet: Property valuations make up to 50% or more of an individual’s net worth. Most of the times when we write financial plans, we find that people don’t have their property insured. By not getting it insured, you’re opening yourself up for disasters.

Have you identified your financial goals with dates and amounts? What does that mean?

Sumeet: Try to ascertain whether you are saving or investing. The difference is that saving means ‘Income (minus) expense.’ When you save for a defined goal, defined time period, defined amount, defined risk – it is an investment. We want to ascertain if people are aligning their goals to their investments which are in date and objective. It is very important for any kind of financial plan to be prepared.

Are your investments diversified across all classes? What does that help you understand about your client?

Sumeet: That basically means ‘are people going overboard in a typical asset class like real estate’… especially in India. If you go with families, real estate is one asset class which most of them understand. Most of their money goes into real estate because it has definitely given them a good return. It doesn’t give a diversified portfolio and so your risk is not getting covered by going into one asset class. So we deliberately ask that question so that we can analyze for the financial plan – are they diversified, are the risk diversified, are their assets diversified – so that’s the objective.

Also we want to tell people that there is some amount of risk attached with every kind of investment. You cannot plan your portfolio without understanding risk. No risk-free return.

What are the current investments you hold – share, equity, mutual funds, debt mutual funds, bank deposits, government savings, real estate…do you leave the balance on your credit card rather than pay off the full amount?

What we see in most families is that they have surpluses yet they don’t pay their credit card bills on time. They just carry on without understanding what kind of cost they are paying. No payment of credit card leads to debt trap.

(To be continued…)

Financial Planner, a personal finance show which I produce and host has been received with great feedback. I also bump into a lot of people who ask me if there was some place where they could read up on the expert advice given on the show. Well, the answer is Yes! On Indiejourno. Over the next few weeks, I promise to update the blog with all the content from the shows. We have been extremely fortunate to have some amazing guests who offer a lot of valuable advice. I hope to share that with you over the next few days.

In the meantime, catch the show that airs Tuesdays and Thursdays on BloombergUTV, at 5.30 Pm IST.

The MTA is getting set to eliminate the Queens bound W train, drawing howls of protest from Astoria residents (Pic Courtesy: The Daily News)

The “W” line that runs from Astoria, Queens, to Manhattan’s South Ferry is the quintessential middle child. It has trouble attracting attention and competes with its three other siblings, the N, Q, and R lines.

The elimination of the “W” line drew howls of protest from local commuters who take the train to and from Astoria, but what about commuters downtown – who take the train from Manhattan to South Ferry?

Kiwi Grady, who commutes from New York University to Whitehall each day, says she could easily take other trains if the “W” doesn’t show up. “As long as the “R” runs I will take that. I can also take the 4 or 5 which are faster but more crowded.”

Grady believes the elimination of the “W” would hit commuters to Queens the hardest. “Down here in Manhattan, you have a lot of options. But for those in the outer boroughs, they’ll be hit hardest”. Fred Willis, who hopped on the “W” at 42^nd Street, agreed. “I don’t think, it makes a big difference downtown,” he said, adding, “it is just a convenient connector.”

The axing of the “W” line is just one of the several service reductions outlined in the MTA’s 2010 budget. The “Z” train and 24 bus routes are also to be canceled, and free student MetroCards will no longer be offered. The cuts are meant to close a $383 million budget gap.

But for commuters on the downtown “W” line, crowds are not a worry. “It is crowded only in rush hour,” said Davawn Cassidy, a package delivery man from Brooklyn who rides the train more than ten times each week. “The R train runs on the same line, and the N is an express – so no worries,” Cassidy smiles and draws his big bag of packages around him in a car that has only two other people in it.

So, will commuters downtown miss the “W” when it is finally guillotined?

“I missed it now,” puffed Maria Bido, as she watched the train pull away from the platform.

Read more:

Commuters in LIC/Astoria protest “W” train cuts.

Why the “W” should stay

Day laborers gather at Hart Part, Queens for a hot breakfast given by a local soup kitchen. Residents are angry at the increasing crowds milling outside the park (Photo: Smriti Rao)

On any given day, you would find day worker Jose Manuel at Hart Park, 69th at 37th Avenue, Jackson Heights. The painter from Mexico comes to the park each morning hoping to be picked up for work. On Tuesdays, a mobile soup kitchen run by St. John’s Bread and Life provides him and his friends with a hot breakfast of pasta and beans that makes the wait, which has gotten longer, a little more bearable.

“I have been coming here for a long time now,” said Manuel, eating his breakfast. “Earlier they weren’t this many people,” he said referring to about 60 day laborers still waiting for work at 10.30 in the morning. “But now there are no jobs,” he continues, adding “maybe in January it will get a little better.”

As Manuel and his friends mill outside Hart Park waiting for work; across the street, Stathis Amides, the superintendent of the building across the Park is seething. He stands with a small camera in his hand to record any digressions the workers make.

“I have been seeing this for a year now,” says Amidis, referring to the mobile soup kitchen. “They feed the people, then the workers take their platters to Roosevelt Avenue, and litter all along the block,” he said, adding he was normally up at about 6 am each day to clean up after the workers. “This is a very big problem for me,” he fumed.

Amidis is not alone in his anger towards the workers. A group of irritated residents went as far as posting on a neighborhood blog, their complaints against the soup kitchen and the workers.

Amidst calls for the soup kitchen to move elsewhere in Woodside, the angry residents, who were unnamed on the blog wrote: “Their [the soup kitchen] intrusion into our neighborhood is unwanted and unneeded. None of the residents ever take food from them.” Saying the soup kitchen feeding immigrants was a “creepy intrusion,” the residents worried about their children being exposed to the workers, complained about the bathrooms in the park getting dirty and said the soup kitchen and the day laborers both contributed in reducing the quality of life in the neighborhood.

St.John’s Bread and Life says it is bewildered by the open hostility. “We have been doing this [running the soup kitchen], at the same site, for the last two years now,” said Anthony Butler, Executive Director of the program that feeds roughly 300 laborers at Hart Park each Tuesday and about 3000 others city wide. “But the complaints started just two months ago. It’s kind of xenophobic, really,” he said, adding while undocumented labor was a big issue in the Country, people were being scrooges at this time of the year. “So, should we only feed people who are legal,” he asked adding there was a great deal of racism when it came to to the complaints. “We have seen a 20-30% increase in laborers because of the recession, and we have also seen an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment. The undocumented [laborers] get blamed for everything,” he said.

Meanwhile, Amides, who has to deal with the workers on an everyday basis, said he wasn’t against the workers, only their attitudes. “Everyday, they bother the tenants,” he said, referring to the workers, “they tease the young girls, “Yo mamita, Yo mamita,” he mimicked.”I understand they are looking for jobs, but I can’t understand them bothering the little girls.”

Residents also complain that they feel unsafe for their children when the workers are milling about Hart Park.”We don’t mind them staying in Woodside, but not on the playground,” said another resident who wished to be unnamed. “They [the soup kitchen] are welcome to stay in Woodside,” she said, “Just move three or four blocks in either direction.”

A request that Sister Kathy Byrnes of St. John’s Bread and Life says, is untenable. “Some neighborhoods want immigrants to disappear,” she said, “We came here because the workers gather here, it’s not the other way around. We try to serve those most in need.” She said that since the soup kitchen clarified park rules,  workers have been notified not to enter Hart Park, as it is against the rules to enter the park without children. “Now, they don’t go into the park, but they can use the bathrooms,” she specified, much to the chagrin of the residents.

As the soup kitchen and the residents battle it out, workers like Jose and his friends admit to a few bad apples in their crowd. “Sometimes, some workers drink in the park in summer,” Jose said, “we tell them not to, but they still do it,” he added. He said the workers were warned by the local precinct to behave and added that it was a  shame that some workers didn’t play by the rules. “This is where we have to meet everyday,” he said, referring to the pick up point. “If they [residents] kick us out from here, where will we go?” he asked, as he finished his breakfast and started another long wait in the biting cold – hoping to be picked up for work.

This piece first appeared in Queens Chronicle

Helen Fielding's clumsy protagonist Bridget Jones struggles with the double whammy of making wrong choices; both with her food and with her men!

Peer into any chick-lit lover’s bookshelf and you might spot the obligatory Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Devil Wears Prada and the terrifyingly titled Skinny Bitch. Page after soppy page details the travails of heroines who stumble and bumble through their diets, makeovers and professional lives—only to emerge skinny, chic, successful and finally with that job at The New Yorker.

Positive these successes could be duplicated in our dingy lives, we swear off the fudge and trash that bag of chips, convinced that a diet could help us shed a few pounds here, make us a little leaner there and hold the ticket to success. But what if it didn’t.

Author Lorraine Duffy Merkl dishes on her debut novel Fat Chick (Pic Courtesy: Our Town)

In her debut novel Fat Chick, columnist Lorraine Duffy Merkl holds up a mirror to the lessons of a lifetime of dieting. While every girl eager to find her prince kisses frogs called diets, it may turn out you’re wasting your time on the wrong thing. In the novel, protagonist Trish is an advertising professional who has just lost a prestigious account to a skinny colleague. Talented and on a mission to reclaim her position in the agency, Trish embarks on a vicious dieting routine with surprising consequences.

Merkl, a freelance advertising consultant whose work has been published in the New York Times and New York Post, recently sat down over breakfast to give us the skinny on Fat Chick. She is already at work on her second book.

Q: You say there is a difference between fat chick and a fat chick mentality.

A: When I tell women what the book is about, more than one person has asked, “Am I on the cover of the book?” They say it jokingly, but you know there is some truth to their saying it. If you are a size 2 and you turn around and ask your friend if you look fat in an outfit, that’s not a fat chick, but a fat chick mentality.

Q: Your protagonist Trish is similar to the pre-makeover Peggy Olson, from Mad Men. Maybe she could take a few lessons from Joan?

A: Joan is a perfect example of someone who is “stacked.” She is poised, gracious, so confident—she looks beautiful—yet she is a big woman. The de facto heroine in my book is also a big woman, a plus-size model who carries herself with great confidence and poise. People trash media images for projecting certain body types. But even if there were no models, no pictures, you would still see women in a communal changing room or in a bathing suit at the beach and compare yourself to other people. You should not be caught up in what others think. The book talks about fashion, but it doesn’t trash fashion or magazines for women’s body issues.

Q: You are 51 now and have yo-yo dieted since you were 13. Is this a memoir?

A: It’s not a memoir, it’s a novel. As with any fiction writer, I took stories from my own life. I didn’t want this story to be about a fat girl that lives happily ever after, after losing a ton of weight. If that were true, then people like Kirstie Alley wouldn’t be gaining weight.

Q: Do thin chicks get the guys, or is that a myth?

A: It’s a myth. People like [Tiger Wood’s wife] Elin Nordegren, Jennifer Aniston—people we hold up as beautiful women and think, “If only I had her hair, if I had her legs,” if that were all it took to be happy, then bad things would never happen to beautiful people. Comparing yourself to others is a waste of time. Run your own race.

–
Fat Chick is available exclusively at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

This piece originally appeared in Our Town

Ta Ta Tiger! Tag Heuer is the latest company after Accenture, Gillette, AT&T to drop Tiger Woods from their campaigns

The Tiger saga continues to play out like a train wreck on a car wreck.

In the third biggest endorsement loss this month, Swiss watch maker Tag Heuer has dropped Tiger Woods from their marketing campaign.

The move comes after the public unraveling of Tiger’s marital and sex life after almost 14 alleged mistresses tumbled out the closet, mussed hair and all, to claim affairs with the golfing superstar.

“We recognize Tiger Woods as a great sportsman, but we have to take account of the sensitivity of some consumers in relation to recent events,” Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Christophe Babain told Swiss newspaper Le Matin.”

The company — whose luxury timepieces sell for thousands of dollars — said it would continue to support Woods’ charitable foundation but would rely on other celebrities, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, to be its public face.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, leader of the rumored legendary late-’90s entourage known as “The P—y Posse.” Wonder if Tag Heuer remembers that, added New York Magazine snarkily.

Whatevs! Getting booted out by Leo is the latest in a string of rejections for Tiger.

On Sunday, consulting firm Accenture dropped the athlete, saying he was “no longer the right representative” of the company’s values. Gillette, a unit of the Procter & Gamble Co., said over the weekend that it won’t air ads for its razors that include Woods or include him in public appearances. AT&T said it is evaluating its relationship with the golf superstar.

And so it goes…

Its title, Five Flawed Assumptions of Obama’s Afghan Surge, says it all, and the piece itself summarizes concisely points that this site and many others have been arguing for months:
1. Expanding the ground war against the Taliban will in no way guarantee us any greater success in finding and confront members of Al-Qaeda.
2. We cannot build an Afghan National Army capable of defending its national sovereignty within a few years.

3. We cannot work with President Karzai.

4. A an alleged withdrawal date will not exert pressure on President Karzai, who has been forging alliances with the expectation that we will leave eventually anyway.

5. Pakistan may take on insurgents that challenge its own government, but it never has, and probably never will fight members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban on the border if they are merely using the region to launch attacks into Afghanistan.

Conducting a war under these realities is a lot harder than waging one under the false assumptions the Obama administration has presented.

Surprisingly, the Time article does not even offer an “on the hand” argument. This article is firmly against Obama’s Afghanistan policy, in more decisive terms than any publication of its stature. It’s worth checking out.

The most recent Time issue also includes a typically wishy-washy editorial from Joe Klein, who does include a gem of a sentence in which he calls Obama’s deliberations over the war: the struggles of a highly intelligent, dispassionate man to find a rationale for a mission that is crucial but slightly crazy, a decision that will define his presidency.

Amen.

Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Economics Prize, 1998. Pic Courtesy: Outlook Magazine

‘Tis the Nobel season anyways, and while we are yakking up Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize, here is another winner. Albeit for economics, and from another year.  Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his work in welfare economics. While I have never had the stomach to digest his massive tome The Argumentative Indian, I did manage to read through his interview with Vinod Mehta in Outlook magazine.

Asked how many cheers he would give Indian democracy, Sen replied he would give it more than two and somewhere less than three.  “If you take the view, is democracy functioning as well as it could, it may even be one. But given the adversities we have had—a very poor country, largely illiterate, border wars with China and Pakistan, with Pakistan going its peculiarly difficult way, the relationship problems that we have had with the United States and the global powers—have we done as well as expected? Yes. Except in one big respect, namely that I had expected that non-dramatic deprivations would receive more attention than they ended up getting. Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.”

Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.

On Prakash Karat’s (General Secretary of the Communist Party of India) ridiculous statement that Cuba is a good role model for India, Amartya Sen  laughs and says that there are things to learn from Cuba about health-care and basic education, not about democracy and not about media freedom. He notes that it is a very unfree country. Sen also points out there are things to learn from America, but not about medical care for the masses , adding there is no country that provides us with a model.

Read Amartya Sen’s full interview here.

Kevin Kim, who won the Democratic Primary for New York City Council

On September 15, as the promise of autumn hung lightly in the air, New Yorkers headed into booths to cast their votes in the City Council primaries. What they saw on the ballot–among the Gleasons, Gregorys and Massons–the last names Kim, Choe and Jung.

Contesting for the seat of Councilman were P. J. Kim (District 1, Lower Manhattan), Kevin Kim (District 19, Bayside, Queens), and John Choe and S. J. Jung (both from District 20, Flushing, Queens). A historic 4 Korean American candidates competed in New York’s City Council primaries. And when the results came in on the 16th, Kevin Kim emerged as the winner of the Democratic nomination for City Council from District 19.

Kim’s surprise victory saw him raking him 30 percent of the vote and defeating presumed front-runner Jerry Iannece and four other Democratic opponents. It also brought him one step closer to being the first Korean American to be elected to New York’s lawmaking body.

Kim’s victory marks the political maturation of the Korean American community, a moment that Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, termed as “decisive.” Sam Yoon, who had an unsuccessful bid running for Mayor of Boston, described the primaries as a “watershed moment in New York politics.”

But after the warm glow of victory, it’s time for some cold hard truths.

Despite these Koreans making an impressive play for New York City Council, there still remains a huge gap in Korean American leadership.

Though Koreans, at 1.5 million, represent the 5th largest immigrant group in the United States, there are less than a handful of prominent Korean political leaders in the country. New York alone has 132,000 Korean Americans, according to the latest census figures, yet none have been elected to the New York City Council, the State Legislature or any statewide office.

“We still haven’t found a sense of urgency to get involved in politics,” said Kevin Kim, referring to the Korean-Americans in the Tri-State area. “If they are citizens, they don’t register (to vote), and if they’re registered, they don’t vote in the primaries – robbing themselves of the chance to pick a candidate they truly believe in”

In Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens, a man sits by a fruit cart, piled high with plums, apples and bananas. Asked if he had voted in the primaries, he shakes his head. “No politics, no politics,” he said in broken English, impatient with the questions and eager to direct his attention to a customer.

Businessman first, citizen next–the fruit seller may well embody one of the biggest challenges facing the Korean community in America.

One of the explanations for the community’s reticence to participate in the political process, says Esther Jung, a community organizer involved with P. J. Kim’s city campaign, is cultural. “For Koreans, it’s hard to be civic-minded,” says Jung. “Volunteerism is not even a concept back home.” Jung also observes that new émigrés struggle to assimilate. “Koreans have to learn that they are not in Korea anymore. They have to learn to be part of the American community.”

Nowhere was this chasm between mainstream America and the immigrant community more evident than during the Los Angeles race riots in 1992. “We learned the hard way,” said Sukhee Kang, the mayor of Irvine, California. “Over 700 business owners lost their livelihood overnight. We didn’t have any protection from local authorities, law enforcement and local politicians. We had to protect our own stores; that was a big lesson for our community.”

Brad Lee adds, “Korean American history has gone on for 100 years now. But we still don’t have any network systems in place.”

To put those networks in place, community leaders are urging young Koreans to start looking beyond professions such as medicine and accounting, and to consider other options like politics. “A lot of [Korean Americans] are fixed on success,” says Jung, adding that many second generation Korean Americans also get pigeonholed into going to the Ivys in order to fulfill their immigrant parents’ dreams. But, “we are not robots, we all have different gears.”

Two of the Korean American candidates in the City Council primaries, despite their Ivy-laced degrees, chose to look beyond the boardroom. Kevin Kim hails from Stanford and Columbia, and P. J. Kim wields degrees from Princeton and Harvard.

“I could have been one of the 500 associates at McKinsey and no one would care,” says P. J. “Or, I could do something for the community and make a difference.”

Even if Korean Americans don’t have the stomach to step into the political ring, leaders remind the community that they need to be more aggressive in voicing their concerns–and voting. And with the census just around the corner, Korean Americans have to also stand up and be counted. Kevin Kim also suggests a year-long program designed to get more Korean-Americans register as voters. “Churches have been doing a great job registering voters,” said Kim.” Now, we need to get civic organizations, charity organizations to start registering Korean-Americans,” adding the drive would be non-partisan and be the first step towards greater political participation.

Additionally, for any Korean American leader to succeed, it has also become imperative to cobble together broad support across various ethnic groups. Case in point is Sam Yoon’s election as Boston City councilor at-large in 2005, the first non-white ever elected to serve that post. Yoon could make it happen only with the support of the Chinese community. The 39-year-old naturalized citizen, a graduate of Harvard and Yale, came in third place in the Boston Mayoral Primaries.

“Boston is a world class, 21st century city, rich in academic resources, health care innovation, but Boston politics and the government is still in the Dark Ages,” said Yoon. “To have a Korean American candidate represent new ideas and fresh energy, captures the city’s imagination.”

As the leaves turn across the Northeast and political wheels grind forward, there is an unmistakable air of change. As Kevin Kim prepares to face off with his Republican opponent in the November 3^rd City Council election and Sam Yoon charts out a future course of action, their contests should remind Koreans that in a country where the highest office is occupied by the son of an immigrant, anything is possible.