Financial Planning For Seafarers: Importance Of Electronic Communication

Most of the people to whom my articles are normally directed at are seafarers, NRIs and HNIs or high net-worth individuals. However this may have to do with everyone who would care to read.

Normally it is very awkward for a middle-aged male like me to stand up for the modern methods which everyone vouchsafes to be unsafe and full of risks. There is a very high level IT professional in UK whom I know (having a doctorate in Computer Science). He operates with conventional methods and does not access his bank account except by a ATM card. He may be aware of a few things that we are not aware of, however we will continue with our discussion.

Electronic Communication

There are stories galore how in past years people lost admission to prestigious colleges, or employment or a large investment opportunity because they did not get the required letter in time for whatever reason.

Nowadays it is rare to find anyone without an email address. It is in order too, as written communication has reached mind boggling speed and hence expedited the inter-personal and official transactions. Even the government offices have adopted email for official medium of transfer of information to individual stakeholders e.g. interview letters, appointment letters. Admit cards and results are freely being communicated through emails and SMS.

All this not only brings speed to our communication but also saves natural resources like trees for paper and fossil fuel for means of transportation which would otherwise be required to support the snail mail system of communication.

However the reason why I would like to support eCommunication is something else, in addition to ensuring that you receive your correspondence.

Privacy: Letters and other Official documents are open to breach of privacy especially in today’s colony based culture of row- houses or apartments. I have witnessed people complaining how their letters are being regularly opened and again sealed back.

At times few missing letters from the bank may be sufficient to reveal your financial position and liability to unscrupulous elements. I have witnessed a case where the perpetrators / kidnappers came to know about the amount in the bank account from a Bank Statement passed on by the Postman.

Statement of Account: Statement of a Bank account does not only reveals your bank balance, but a few other personal details about you like PAN number, email address, nomination etc.

While the Statement of bank account gives out your immediate financial position, SOA of your DEMAT account and Mutual Funds are even worse. They can give out your total financial standing of your life-long savings to people. The scenario is indeed scary as it gives a sense of violation.

Primary and secondary system of email: It is also a relatively common complain that a person’s email has been hacked. To this I had come up with an idea of Primary and a Secondary system of email.

With this system there is a central email address e.**********@gm***.com. This ID is never publicized or given to anyone except family members. Now you can create few other SECONDARY email addresses for various purposes. 1 email ID for your bank, 1 for your MFs and demat account, 1 for public domains like promotions and 1 for your employer etc. Next step is to install a email client like Outlook, Eudora etc. on your PC. Laptop or Tab and have all the above accounts on the same client for receiving emails. For sending emails you can individually select the email id from which the email is to go out.

Second method is to go individually to the particular POP mail site and the email account and create the FORWARDING to your Primary email address, which was yo******@gm***.com .

In this way your individual email addresses will not be known by entities who should not know that address and you will also be able to know if a particular email address has been breached.

This will also deal with the data theft of email address that has become prevalent nowadays with employees of banks, insurance companies resigning and carrying away the data with them to be misused later.

Conclusion

• Always opt for online statement of account of banks, Demat services, Mutual funds, Insurance companies etc.
• Have individual email IDs for individual uses and have them redirected to your unique central account.
• Relying completely on emails will not only enable you to receive and organise them systematically but also keep a record for an extended period of time.

Electronic Transactions

Most of the Seafarers and expatriates have their salaries remitted to a bank’s savings account. This is even today done by depositing cheques in the accounts and the money lies there for a few days to few weeks till you can access the account or issue a cheque on it. It is seen that there is always a week or two delay between the money coming to the account and be invested further. Sometimes this delay can be of months too.

Considering even a 10-15 days delay with 7-8 months for seafarers and 12 months for other individuals, there is a huge opportunity cost involved and wasted. Even if you were to use the money for opening a fixed deposit this gets delayed by 80-120 days for that amount. If the purpose is for investing in MFs or stocks, the loss in opportunity cost is huge.

I have always gained because of the electronic transactions. One such instance I distinctly remember.