Some Common Misconceptions About Home Loans – Know The Truth!!!

Some Common Misconceptions About Home Loans – Know The Truth!!!

Buying a house is a lifelong dream for many of us and since making a down-payment of many lakhs to buy our dream-home is not practically feasible for everybody, we almost always end up going for a “Home Loan” or “Housing Loan”. Easily 2 out of 3 people reading this article would have either taken a home loan or at least would be thinking about going for a home loan. As with many things in our country, there are a lot of misconceptions about home loans which effectively scare us from moving forward. The purpose of this article is to help you understand the truth about those common misconceptions…

Why this Article?

Signing up for a home loan is a HUGE financial decision that will impact your life for the next 10/15/20 years. I have written a few articles in the past about “Buying a Home”, and “How to handle a Home Loan Part Repayment”. However, based on the queries received from blog readers it is pretty obvious that many of them have a lot of misconceptions and hence I thought, why not write something to clear them…

Misconception No. 1:Fixed interest rate is better than floating interest rate

Home Loans usually come in two forms – one with a fixed rate of interest and the other with a floating rate of interest. If you are someone who doesn’t want to risk the fluctuation that is possible on home loan rates, you can choose the fixed rate option. However, there is a catch here – Even if in future loan rates go down, you will still continue to pay the high rate. If you had chosen the floating rate option, reduction in home loan rates would benefit you greatly. But, this floating rate option has its drawback. In case market rates go up, so will yours. So, you need to think and decide based on the market outlook.

Anyways these days banks don’t offer “Fully Fixed” home loans like they used to, before. Most fixed rate home loans these days are hybrid loans where the rate of interest is fixed only for the first few years and the bank reserves the right to review the rate of interest after this initial period.

Fixed Rate loans usually charge the customer a slightly higher rate of interest than floating loans because the bank cannot hike your interest even if the market rates go up. I think going for a flexible rate of interest is OK given the current market outlook because the rate of interests will not go up by more than 0.5% or 1% and it does not make sense to pay the additional interest right away…

Best Practices for Creating Amazon CloudFormation Templates

Best Practices for Creating Amazon CloudFormation Templates

Amazon CloudFormation templates are widely used in the AWS cloud for environment creation by the IT and application teams.  We have been helping enterprises with Amazon CFT based automation for years and following are some of the best practices to follow while creating Amazon CFT Templates. This article compiles the CFT practices /pointers used by us for provisioning complex large scale environments on AWS, not all of them will be applicable for all use cases.

Practice #1: Version your CloudFormation templates

CloudFormation template should be commenced with a template format version and description such that it could be artifact-able with version control tools like Git, SVN, CVS, etc.,

Example:

“AWSTemplateFormatVersion”: “2010-09-09”,

    “Description”: “AWS CloudFormation Template for CustomerXYZ Version 5.0”,

Practice #2: Use input parameters

Input parameters section should be developed in scope with getting values from the end users of the CFT for environments, SSH Key Pairs, EC2 instance types, RDS instance types, ElastiCache node types, etc., and this makes the entire CloudFormation template configurable and maintainable.

Example:

“WebTierKeyName”: {

            “Description”: “Name of an existing EC2 KeyPair to enable SSH access to the WebTier”,

            “Type”: “String”,

            “MinLength”: “1”,

            “MaxLength”: “64”,

            “Default”: “testkey”,

            “AllowedPattern”: “[-_ a-zA-Z0-9]*”,

            “ConstraintDescription”: “can contain only alphanumeric characters, spaces, dashes and underscores.”

Practice #3: AMI ID should be a parameter in inputs section

AMI ID should be asked as an input parameter from the end users for launching EC2 instances. It is highly recommended not to hard code it inside your template and make it configurable dynamically.

Example:

“NatAMIID”: {

            “Type”: “String”,

            “Default”: “ami-XXXXXXXX”,

            “Description”: “The AMIID of NAT Instance”

        },

Practice #4: Mention the AMI mappingsAMI Mappings should be included in the CloudFormation template to validate the respective AMI(s) in the region(s) specified else it will take default AMI for the region (which is not advisable).

Example:

“Mappings”: {

        “RegionMap”: {

            “us-east-1”: {

                “AMI”: “ami-XXXXXXXX”

            },

“us-west-2”: {

                “AMI”: “ami-XXXXXXXX”

            },

Practice #5: Use WaitConditionHandle, WaitCondition, DependsOn wherever applicable

When creating a large multi-tiered infrastructure using CFT on AWS, there are times when the order of the resource launch is important. For Example WaitCondition that waits for the desired number of instances in a web server group.

Using the AWS::CloudFormation::WaitCondition and AWS::CloudFormation::WaitConditionHandle resources, a wait condition can be placed with in a template to make AWS CloudFormation pause the creation of the stack and wait for a signal before it continues to create the stack.

We can specify that the creation of a specific resource to follow another using the “DependsOn” attribute. On adding a DependsOn attribute to a resource, it is created only after the creation of the resource specified in the DependsOn attribute.

Example:

“WebServerGroup” : {

   “Type” : “AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup”,

   “Properties” : {

      “AvailabilityZones” : { “Fn::GetAZs” : “” },

      “LaunchConfigurationName” : { “Ref” : “LaunchConfig” },

      “MinSize” : “1”,

      “MaxSize” : “5”,

      “DesiredCapacity” : { “Ref” : “WebServerCapacity” },

      “LoadBalancerNames” : [ { “Ref” : “ElasticLoadBalancer” } ]

   }

},

“WaitHandle” : {

   “Type” : “AWS::CloudFormation::WaitConditionHandle”

},

“WaitCondition” : {

   “Type” : “AWS::CloudFormation::WaitCondition”,

   “DependsOn” : “WebServerGroup”,

   “Properties” : {

      “Handle”  : { “Ref” : “WaitHandle” },

      “Timeout” : “300”,

      “Count”   : { “Ref” : “WebServerCapacity” }

   }

}   

10 Best Practice Tips for architecting your Amazon VPC

10 Best Practice Tips for architecting your Amazon VPC

According to me Amazon VPC is one of the most important feature introduced by AWS. We have been using AWS from 2008 and Amazon VPC from the day it was introduced and i strongly feel the customer adoption towards AWS cloud gained real momentum only after the introduction of VPC into the market. 

Amazon VPC comes with lots of advantages over the limitations faced in Amazon Classic cloud like: Static private IP address , Elastic Network Interfaces :  possible to bind multiple Elastic Network Interfaces to a single instance, Internal Elastic Load Balancers, Advanced Network Access Control ,Setup a secure bastion host , DHCP options , Predictable internal IP ranges , Moving NICs and internal IPs between instances, VPN connectivity, Heightened security etc. Each and everything is a interesting topic on its own and i will be discussing them in detail in future.

Today i am sharing some of our implementation experience on working with hundreds of Amazon VPC deployments as best practice tips for the AWS user community. You can apply some of the relevant ones in your existing VPC or use these points as part of your migration approach to Amazon VPC.

Please also look into 27 Best practices on AWS Security Groups to understand the relation with Amazon VPC. 

Practice 1) Get your Amazon VPC combination right: Select the right Amazon VPC architecture first.  You need to decide the right Amazon VPC & VPN setup combination based on your current and future requirements. It is tough to modify/re-design the Amazon VPC at later stage, so it is better to design it taking into consideration your NW and expansion needs for next ~2 years. Currently different types of Amazon VPC setups are available; Like Public facing VPC, Public and Private setup VPC, Amazon VPC with Public and Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access, Amazon VPC with Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access, Software based VPN access etc. Choose the one which you feel you will be in next 1-2 years.

Practice 2) Choose your CIDR Blocks: While designing your Amazon VPC, the CIDR block should be chosen in consideration with the number of IP addresses needed and whether we are going to establish connectivity with our data center. The allowed block size is between a /28 netmask and /16 netmask. Amazon VPC can have contain from 16 to 65536 IP addresses. Currently Amazon VPC once created can’t be modified, so it is best to choose the CIDR block which has more IP addresses usually. Also when you design the Amazon VPC architecture to communicate with the on premise/data center ensure your CIDR range used in Amazon VPC does not overlaps or conflicts with the CIDR blocks in your On premise/Data center. Note: If you are using same CIDR blocks while configuring the customer gateway it may conflict.
E.g., Your VPC CIDR block is 10.0.0.0/16 and if you have 10.0.25.0/24 subnet in a data center the communication from instances in VPC to data center will not happen since the subnet is the part of the VPC CIDR. In order to avoid these consequences it is good to have the IP ranges in different class. Example., Amazon VPC is in 10.0.0.0/16 and data center is in 172.16.0.0/24 series.

Practice 3) Isolate according to your Use case: Create separate Amazon VPC for Development , Staging and Production environment (or) Create one Amazon VPC with Separate Subnets/Security/isolated NW groups for Production , Staging and development. We have observed 60% of the customer preferring the second choice. You chose the right one according to your use case.

Practice 4) Securing Amazon VPC : If you are running a machine critical workload demanding complex security needs you can secure the Amazon VPC like your on-premise data center or more sometimes. Some of the tips to secure your VPC are:

• Secure your Amazon VPC using Firewall virtual appliance, Web application firewall available from Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You can use check point, Sophos etc for this
• You can configure Intrusion Prevention or Intrusion Detection virtual appliances and secure the protocols and take preventive/corrective actions in your VPC
• Configure VM encryption tools which encrypts your root and additional EBS volumes. The Key can be stored inside AWS (or) in your Data center outside Amazon Web Services depending on your compliance needs
• Configure Privileged Identity access management solutions on your Amazon VPC to monitor and audit the access of Administrators of your VPC.
• Enable the cloud trail to audit in the VPC environments  ACL policy’s. Enable cloud trail
• Apply anti virus for cleansing specific EC2 instances inside VPC. Trend micro has very good product for this.
• Configure Site to Site VPN for securely transferring information between Amazon VPC in different regions or between Amazon VPC to your On premise Data center
• Follow the Security Groups and NW ACL’s best practices listed below

Practice 5) Understand Amazon VPC Limits: Always design the VPC subnets in consideration with the expansion in the future. Also understand the Amazon VPC’s limits before using the same. AWS has various limitations on the VPC components like Rules per security group, No of route tables and Subnets etc. Some of them may be increased after providing the request to the Amazon support team while few components cannot be increased. Ensure the limitations are not affecting your overall design.

Practice 6) IAM your Amazon VPC: When you are going to assign people to maintain your Amazon VPC you can create Amazon IAM account with the fine grained permissions (or) use Sophisticated Privileged identity Management solutions available on AWS marketplace to IAM your VPC.

Practice 7) Disaster Recovery or Geo Distributed Amazon VPC Setup : When you are designing a Disaster Recovery Setup plan using VPC or expanding to another Amazon VPC region you can follow these simple rules. Create your Production site VPC CIDR : 10.0.0.0/16 and your DR region VPC CIDR:  172.16.0.0/16. Make sure they do not conflict with on premises subnet CIDR block in event both needs to be integrated to on premise DC as well. After CIDR blocks creation , setup a VPC tunnel between regions and to your on premise DC. This will help to replicate your data using private IP’s.

Practice 8) Use security groups and Network ACLs wisely:  It is advisable to use security groups over Network ACLs inside Amazon VPC wherever applicable for better control. Security groups are applicable on EC2 instance level while network ACL is applicable on Subnet level.  Security groups are used for White list mostly. To blacklist IPs, one can use Network ACLs.

Practice 9) Tier your Security Groups : Create different security groups for different tiers of your infrastructure architecture inside your VPC. If you have Web, App, DB tiers create different security group for each of them. Creating tier wise security groups will increase the infrastructure security inside Amazon VPC.  EC2 instances in each tier can talk only on application specified ports and not at all ports. If you create Amazon VPC security groups for each and every tier/service separately it will be easier to open a port to a particular service. Don’t use same security group for multiple tiers of instances, this is a bad practice.

Example: Open ports for security group instead of IP ranges : For example : People have tendency to open for port 8080 to 10.10.0.0/24 (web layer) range. Instead of that, open port 8080 to web-security-group. This will make sure only web security group instances will be able to contact on port 8080. If someone launches NAT instance with NAT-Security-Group in 10.10.0.0/24, he won’t be able to contact on port 8080 as it allows access from only web security group.

Practice 10 ) Standardize your Security Group Naming conventions : Following a security group naming conventions inside Amazon VPC will improve operations/management for large scale deployments inside VPC. It also avoids manual errors, leaks and saves cost and time overall.

For example: Simple ones like Prod_DMZ_Web_SG or Dev_MGMT_Utility_SG (or) complex coded ones for large scale deployments like

USVA5LXWEBP001- US East Virginia AZ 5 Linux Web Server Production 001

This helps in better management of security groups.

Using Tsunami UDP in AWS- How it helps, Configuration and Comparison

Using Tsunami UDP in AWS- How it helps, Configuration and Comparison

Tsunami UDP is an open source file transfer protocol that helps you with faster files transfers compared to traditional models like FTP and SCP. Tsunami UDP is designed with a fast user-space file transfer protocol that uses TCP control and UDP data for transfer over very high speed long distance networks, it helps you achieve more throughput than possible with TCP over the same networks.

In this article we are going to use Tsunami UDP to transfer files from Amazon EC2 US-East region to other AWS regions.

Step 1:) Installing Tsunami UDP on Amazon EC2:

Tsunami UDP needs to be compiled from the source and we have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 (RHEL 6.4) EC2 instance in the source and target regions.  Since we are using RHEL we have to ensure that firewall disabled on RHEL 6.4 EC2 instances or add rules to iptables.

TsunamiUDP needs some dependency packages and it should be installed from the repository cvs, autoconf, gcc, and automake.

Execute the following commands for Installing Tsunami UDP on Amazon EC2. The following command will install both Tsunami UDP Server and Tsunami UDP Client in the Amazon EC2 instance.

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tsunami-udp.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tsunami-udp co -P tsunami-udp $ cd tsunami-udp $ ./recompile.sh $ sudo make install

Tsunami UDP Server and Tsunami UDP Client have options to configure lots of parameters based on the file transfer requirements. For simplicity reasons we are going with default settings.

Step 2:) Open relevant ports in Security Groups for Tsunami UDP:

Tsunami UDP uses the port 46224 on TCP and UDP. We have allowed port 22 for SSH. The following ports illustrated in the below image should be allowed in the AWS security group for Tsunami UDP to transfer files.

Step 3) Transfer files from the Server Side
On the server side traverse to the directory/path where the files are available for transfer and start the Tsunami UDP Server daemon.
$ cd /path/to/files
For transferring single file:
$ tsunamid file1 
For transferring multiple files:
$ tsunamid file1 file2 …
For all files inside folder:
$ tsunamid *

When the file transfer is completed, you will get to know transfer details as shown below,

Transmission complete. Server 1 transferred 536870912 bytes in 62.07 seconds (66.0 Mbps)

Step 4) Receive files in the Tsunami UDP Client side

On the client side you can receive/download the files by connecting to Tsunami UDP Server using the Tsunami UDP client.

$ cd /path/to/receive/files $ tsunami tsunami> connect ec2-XX-XX-XX-83.compute-1.amazonaws.com  tsunami> get file1 file2  tsunami> get *

When the file transfer is completed, you will get to know transfer details like below

Transfer complete. Flushing to disk and signaling server to stop… !!!! PC performance figure : 32 packets dropped (if high this indicates receiving PC overload) Transfer duration       : 62.06 seconds Total packet data       : 9440.27 Mbit Goodput data              : 8760.23 Mbit File data                       : 4096.00 Mbit Throughput                  : 152.12 Mbps Goodput w/ restarts  : 141.16 Mbps Final file rate               : 66.00 Mbps Transfer mode             : lossless

Now lets see what we observed as Test results in comparison to SCP

Tsunami UDP vs SCP Comparison Matrix:

The following table illustrates the comparison (time taken) between Tsunami UDP and SCP between Amazon EC2 USA-EAST and AWS Singapore region.

Source : US-EAST  | Target: Singapore
EC2 Instance Type	File Size / Type	Tsunami UDP (time)	SCP (time)
m1.large	5GB Single File Compressed	2m 45s	–
m1.xlarge	5GB Single File Compressed	1m 28s	–
m2.4xlarge	5GB Single File Compressed	51.56s	11m 50s
m2.4xlarge	50GB Single File Compressed	19m 33s	1hr 50min

50 GB Single compressed file when uncompressed translates to 500 GB file size.

Some Best practices while using Tsunami UDP in AWS:
Point 1) When you are moving larger files between Amazon EC2 regions, disk IO is very critical , so use RAID 0 EBS Volumes in the Amazon EC2 instances for better IO performance
Point 2) Use right EC2 instance size for better performance and lower cost. If you are going to transfer 5 GB compressed file, m1.large will be cheaper whereas if you are going to transfer 500 GB compressed file, m2.4xlarge might be faster and cheaper.
Point 3) Atleast 512 MB memory is needed for Tsunami UDP. Do not use micro, small and other EC2 instances with moderate IO and smaller memory for this purpose.
Point 4) As the instance size increases the IO capacity also increases in Amazon cloud. For faster file transfers in event of DR etc, use larger instance types. Example: In event of DR when RTO is critical, you can transfer 50GB files using m2.4xlarge than m1.large.

A New Chapter In My Life; Google

A New Chapter In My Life; Google

When I decided to leave SAP to take a short sabbatical I didn’t really know what to expect. Six months later I am happy to report that it was one of the best decisions I ever made. These were some of the best weeks and months of my life. After this short period of disconnecting to recharge and rejuvenate myself I am reconnecting to the professional world. I have accepted an offer with Google to lead the API Ecosystem for Google Cloud to help drive adoption and monetization of the Google Cloud portfolio of platform and products, at scale, by working with various partners as well as coordinating efforts internally at Google with product management and engineering.

As I disconnected I felt the life slowed down and I had more time on hands and a fewer things to do. I met with many people during my sabbatical to learn from them and bounce off my thoughts. We tend to postpone taking certain decisions and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about many things in life, personal as well as professional, simply because we are compressed on time and each task, activity, or a decision only gets a fraction of overall available time we have. I tried hard not to work hard. Just slowing down and soaking it all in helped clear up many things. Taking time off also helped me prioritize what I really wanted to do. I am a big believer in unstructured free time where there is nothing planned ahead of time; wake up and take each day as it goes. I enjoyed doing mundane tasks and that took my attention off a typical rapid life of a technologist in the Silicon Valley. I would highly encourage you to take a short sabbatical in your career if the circumstances allow you to do so.

To a lifelong learner and a “product” person nothing excites me more than immersing myself into breadth of possible opportunities at the intersection of technology and business to create meaningful impact at Google. I have always admired Google for its ability to take risk by going after some of the hardest problems that require massive scale, foster innovation, and embrace failure as part of its culture. I have always been impressed with the talent Google manages to hire and retain. I am looking forward to be surrounded by people much smarter than me and learn from them. It’s going to be an exciting ride!

Trying to be nice Becomes Less Important For Developers As They Gain Experience

“Trying to be nice” Becomes Less Important For Developers As They Gain Experience

No, I didn’t say this, but 56,033 developers in 173 countries who responded to recent Stack Overflow’s developer survey did.  I have always enjoyed going through these surveys to validate my several hypotheses and learn new things. I would strongly encourage you to go through the results from the most recent survey here.

Here are some interesting insights:

Occupation

“Full stack developer” is the most identified developer occupation. More and more developers are gravitating towards this occupation where they are simultaneously working on 5 to 6 programming languages or frameworks at time. Rise of new languages and frameworks don’t mean developer fragmentation, but more developers picking up more and more languages. It’s not about SQL or Angular; it’s SQL and Angular.

Ninjas: 10% of respondents self-identified as Ninjas! Yeah. So, yes, watch out.

Age

The millennial: The highest percentage of developers, 28.4%, are in the age group 24-29, followed by 23.6% in the age group 20-24, and 18.1 % in the are group 30-34. This validates my hypothesis: more than 70% of developers are millennial, from youngest to oldest.

Average age: India has the lowest average age for developers, 25.5. This might surprise some people unless you look at the overall population and demographics of India. While there is a large number of Indian developers who are older than 25.5 the current number of engineers graduating from colleges and entering into the workforce are outnumbering some of these developers to bring the overall average down. India is the second most populous country in the world (behind China) with median age of 25. Compare that to the US where the median age is 36. It will all make sense.

Star Trek versus Star Wars: The highest percentage of developers (68.4%) like Star Wars. The same age group also happens to like Star Trek the least (17.6%), if at all they know what Star Trek is. If you really like Star Trek you must be old 

Gender disparity

This continues to be the most depressing statistics.

92.8% “developers” are male.

There’s not much salary gap between genders for young developers in the US, but male developers of the age of 30+ get paid up to $20,000 more than female developers. This perhaps explains the ongoing debate: male and female developers get initially hired at similar salaries, but male developers negotiate harder for promotions and raises compared to female developers. I would argue this disparity will most likely be also true for disciplines other than technology.

Diversity

While 73% of developers responded they value diversity, product managers and engineering managers responded they value diversity the most. It validates my hypothesis that people value diversity more when they either hire/manage people or manage a product. While individual contributors still work in a diverse team and most of them value diversity they perhaps don’t realize and appreciate the bigger impact of a diverse team.

Overcoming Outages in AWS : High Availability ArchitecturesOvercoming Outages in AWS : High Availability Architectures This article was enhanced on 26-Oct-2014 “Design for Failure“, we hear this Slogan and importance of this philosophy in many cloud forums and conferences. Yet, every day many applications are Deployed/Architected on AWS without this point in mind. The reasons could be ranging from technical awareness of designing High availability(HA) Architectures to Cost of Operating a complex global HA setup in AWS. In this article, i have shared some of my prior experience on architecting High Availability systems on AWS avoiding and overcoming outages. I feel this small gesture will create HA awareness and help the strong AWS user community to build better solutions. A typical Web App stack consists of DNS, Load Balancer, Web, App, Cache and Database layer. Now let us take this stack and see what are the major points that needs to be considered while building High Availability Architectures in AWS: Architecting High Availability in AWS High Availability @ Web/App tier High Availability @ Load balancing tier High Availability @ DNS tier High Availability @ Caching tier High Availability @ Database tier High Availability @ Search tier (in progress) High Availability @ NoSQL tier (in progress) High Availability @ Monitoring tier (in progress) High Availability @ Storage tier (in progress) Architecting High Availability across Amazon AZ’s Architecting High Availability across AWS Regions Architecting High Availability across Cloud and Hosting Providers/DC High Availability @ Web/App tier To avoid Single Point of Failure in the Web/App layer it is a common practice to launch the Web/App layer in minimum two or more EC2 instances. This is fault tolerant than the single EC2 instance design and offers better application stability. Usually the Web/App Servers are designed either with Stateless or State full models. Following are some of the common architecture patterns for HA in Web/App Layer in AWS Infra:

LIC insurance behemoth bought 46%shares of RCF

LIC  insurance behemoth bought 46% shares of RCF : Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) once again played the role of a white knight to rescue the share auction of Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers (RCF) by the government.
The insurance behemoth bought 46%, or 31.63 million of the 69 million shares on offer of RCF during its offer for sale (OFS) last week.

This is not the first time LIC has bailed out a government disinvestment it had bought more than half of the bids in the ONGC and Hindustan Copper offering as well.

“We have not bailed out anyone. We have examined this (RCF) issue by its own strength and then taken a decision to participate. We will examine the future issues in a similar manner and then take a call,” D K Mehrotra, chairman of LIC told Business Standard today.

However, an investment banker familiar with the development said LIC was ‘asked to keep the powder dry’ for the RCF offering. “As the share-sale was not even half covered an hour before the close of bids. LIC had to put in a large-ticket application,” he said requesting anonymity.

Post the OFS, LIC now holds 6.69% stake in RCF, compared to 0.96% earlier.

Shares of RCF today closed at Rs 43.1, about 4% below their OFS price of about Rs 45 per share.

Investments made by LIC are typically for the long term but the mark-to-market losses on LIC’s investments in RCF share auction stand at Rs 6.2 crore.

The government had raised about Rs 310 crore by divesting its 12.5% holdings in RCF through the OFS route on March 8.The 69 million share auction was subscribed 1.3 times and bulk of the bids had come at a price of Rs 45.02 per share as against the minimum offer price of Rs 45 per share.

Last year, the state-owned insurance major had bought about 377 million shares (88%) of the 427 million shares that were on offer during the ONGC share-auction, which was part of last year’s disinvestment programme.

Earlier this year too during the Hindustan Copper OFS, LIC had to pick up 22.5 million shares, more than half the total 51.6 million shares auctioned.

Pros and Cons of Single Limit Liability Car Insurance

Single Limit Liability is a type of Insurance under Car Liability that has one fixed amount for coverage. This is contrary to Split Limit Insurance wherein there is a pre- set amount for 3 areas: Bodily Injury per Person/Bodily Injury per Accident/ Property Damage. In this article, we will discuss more about the Pros and Cons of Single Limit Liability or Combined Single Liability Insurance for your car.

Single Limit Liability is really a plus for car owners. It combines all amounts for your totaled expenses incurred in an accident. Imagine if the damage you have done will cost so much, your single limit liability insurancewill take care of the bulk of amount. Unlike split liability, you will have a limit for each injury, so you will have to pay for the excess bills.

To cite an example, if you have accidentally bumped your car into someone crossing the road, you will be obliged to pay for injuries and possibly legal suits. Will your split limit liability insurance pay for all these? Since there is a limit, you will probably be insured for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Say for instance $300,000 for bodily injury. That’s all it will pay for. The rest of the amount, you will be forced to shoulder. If you have single limit liability, you will be able to be covered for a higher amount for all damages combined, thus, reducing the risk of selling your properties and being bankrupt in the process. Single limit liability will save your assets and your reputation as well!
A piece of advice, it is also very wise to get a Car Umbrella Insurance. This will cost a little more, say 400-500 dollars in a year. But its policy limit will range from a million to 5 million dollars! It will also extend coverage to your own home, and other valuable assets and not only for your car. So you will be at peace thinking that your house and car are insured. This, on top of your Single limit liability will extend your limit to a million or so. Going back to the case of the injured pedestrian, what if he will incur close to a million dollars in damages and legal fees? This is a reality that we often dismiss easily. In the process, we lose our homes and our dignity, which could have easily been avoided for an umbrella insurance of just 500 dollars a year!

Disadvantages of Single limit are few. The first one is obviously the cost. It costs higher than Split Liability simply because it has a higher coverage. If you are in a very tight budget, this is not the policy for you. But then again, if for instance, you are on a tight budget and you meet an accident wherein multiple vehicles are involved and you are at fault, your split liability will definitely not suffice. In hindsight, wouldn’t single liability have been the best choice?

Another disadvantage is that processing of claims may be delayed because all the damages will be charged to one amount of coverage, and in the event that many vehicles are involved and many people are injured, they have to submit all claims to the insurance agency and this will take time. Overall, it is still the best choice to have Single Limit Liability Insurance for your car.

Top 10 ways to lower your auto-insurance

Top 10 ways to lower your auto-insurance

In the tough economy, people want to save money in any way that they can. One of expensive expense in the life, is the insurance include the life insurance, health insurance, home insurance and auto insurance. In those insurances, the home and auto-insurance is one that people need to pay all of the fees by themselves, unlike the life or health insurance that employers may help to pay part of the fees. Here have ten ways to help you to lower your auto-insurance.1. Raise your deductibles, the more deductibles you have, the less premiums you going to pay. However, when you raise the deductible, then you need to be driver safer.2. Compare quotes from different insurers, because each insurance company may have different rate of the auto-insurance customers.3. Drive fewer miles, the less you drive, then less risk of collision and the less you file vehicle insurance claim.4. Maintain good credit, if your credit score is lower, then you may view as the high-risk customers and need to pay the high-rate insurance5. Stay a safe driver, mean to lower the risks of collision, then you need to avoid lane hogging, be aware of the conditions, don’t tailgate, prepare you journey, and stay clam.6. Keep a clean driving record7. Combine your auto and home insurance, you may get more discount on your rate if you use the same insurance company to insure your home and car.8. Pick the right coverages, the more coverage you pick, the more premiums that you going to pay, but if you get the less coverage, and then you are taking the risk to pay more money out of your package if you have a claim or at-fault in a collision.9. Choose your car carefully, because the model of car that you drive would affect you premiums10. Take advantage of discounts, because discount can help you to lower your premiums

Why you Need Insurance?

You’ve worked hard to build a solid financial footing for you and your family, so you want to be sure that everything is protected. Accidents and disasters can and do happen, and if you aren’t adequately insured, it could leave you in financial ruin. You need insurance to protect your life, your ability to earn income, and to keep a roof over your head.

1. Types of Insurance You Need

You can insure almost anything under the sun, but certain things absolutely need to be properly insured. This typically includes your life, your health, and your property.

2. Types of Insurance You Probably Don’t Need

While you want to ensure that you’re adequately protected, there are a lot of insurance policies that are unnecessary for most people. Purchasing the wrong insurance, or simply spending too much on insurance can do more harm than good.

3. How Much Life Insurance Do You Need?

This is an important question, and you may find that you don’t need any life insurance, or that you need a million dollars or more in coverage. There are many factors that need to be considered before purchasing life insurance. Find out whether or not you need life insurance, and if so, how much.

4. Finding a Good Auto Insurance Policy

If you own a vehicle, you need to have it insured. Auto insurance is a very competitive industry, and there are a lot of options available to you. Finding the right mix of adequate coverage at a good price can be challenging. Learn how to find the best auto policy for you.

5. Save Money on Your Homeowners Insurance

For many people, their home is one of their biggest assets, so it makes sense to provide adequate coverage. Unfortunately, insuring something expensive such as a house comes at a price, but there are many ways that you can save money on your homeowners insurance.

best life insurance policy to buy

best life insurance policy to buy : Choosing the best life insurance for your situation can be daunting.  With so much conflicting information, this article will go over the differences so that you will be better informed and can choose the right policy.

Many people avoid investing in life insurance simply because they imagine the costs as being too high for their budgets. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of insurance policies available for every set of needs and budgets. A lot of companies will give you an instant term life insurance quote on their website for free. Insurance providers provide death benefit payouts ranging from as little as a few thousand dollars all the way up to a few million. Most providers offer more affordable term life insurance policies—term policies have low premiums and payout death benefits for the duration of a specific period.

If cheap life insurance with low premiums isn’t a priority, the majority of life insurance providers feature coverage plans that accumulate cash value over the life of the policy. With global, universal and whole insurance it is possible to configure lucrative benefits packages that payout death benefits and can be cashed out or borrowed against like equity.

What to Look for in a Life Insurance Policy

Policy Benefits
All insurance policies are different. We evaluated insurance providers largely on the variety and flexibility of the life insurance policies they offer. From five year term life insurance to variable universal policies, our leading picks for life insurance providers provide comprehensive coverage for every set of needs.

Pricing and Premiums
Premium payments are going to be different with different providers depending on risk factors such as your health, lifestyle, age and occupation. In general, insurance providers receiving a high score on our site gave more lucrative term life insurance rates than competitors regardless of age or lifestyle.

Additional Services
Life insurance is a must, but there are many other services we expect to see available in addition to, or as an alternative to, life insurance. Annuities, retirement planning, estate planning, mutual funds and plans tailored for small business are services we expect from the best providers.

Customer Support
Red tape and poor customer service are the last things a grieving family member wants to deal with. Our top picks for life insurance provider boast excellent customer service, approach claims in a timely and professional manner and go out of their way to meet customer expectations.

The Best Life Insurance Policies ?

Term Life Insurance
Term life insurance is typically the best policy for most Americans since it allows you to have the most amount of coverage for the lowest price.  Some of the most outspoken advocates for term life are the popular financial advisors you see on TV; Susie Orman, Dave Rasmey and Clark Howard.  The strategy with term life insurance is to buy term and invest the rest yourself.  Most people have their major obligations for a certain period of time 10-30 years.  After a certain period of time, usually the mortgage is paid down or paid off, the children are grown and your future income won’t need to be protected in the same capacity as it does today.  Term life insurance will be the best solution if this describes your situation.Term life insurance lasts for a designated period of time.  The term period for most companies range from 10, 15, 20, and 30 years and the rates do not change during this time.  Also, there is no penalty for cancelling the policy early.

Whole Life-Universal Life
Whole life insurance is a policy that remains in effect for the policy holder’s entire life. Generally speaking, the policy will remain active as long as the owner continues to pay the policy premiums.  Due to the cost, this type of policy is more optimal for estate planning and for other instances where permanent coverage is needed.

No-Exam Life Insurance
Life insurance that does not require a health exam is going to cost you a lot more than if you did the exam.  This type of policy is ideal for someone who doesn’t have the time to do the medical exam and doesn’t mind paying the extra premiums.  These clients typically need a policy in a hurry to cover a divorcee decree or they may be worried about doing the physical.  Also, do not mistake no-exam life insurance for no-underwriting.  The underwriting on a no-exam policy is very strict and not as favorable as if you did the health exam.

Accidental Death
Accidental death policies only pay out the death benefit you if you die as result of an accident. Typical classifications of accidents include but are not limited to: auto accidents, poisonings, falls, fires and chocking. Deaths from natural causes such as heart disease, cancer and old age are not covered under an accidental death policy.  This type of policy is good if you are traveling, have a dangerous occupation, and have medical problems that will exclude you from getting traditional life insurance.  It’s typically cheaper than term life since the policy only covers accidental deaths.

Wrap Up
Since life insurance is going to be one of the most important financial purchases you ever make to protect your loved ones, choosing the right policy is paramount.  Don’t let an overzealous agent talk you into buying a policy that you don’t need just so he can receive a larger commission.  Work with an experienced agent that will have you and your family’s best interest at heart.

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