Ouch! I broke my writing arm!

Have you ever thought about this? If you are single, most likely you operate your bank accounts and investments in your single name.

What if you have a fall and can't sign for a few weeks or months? How would you pay your bills, draw money or access your investments? It's a thought that has haunted me over the last few months whilst I stepped in to help a friend in a similar situation.

Here is a glimpse of what I learnt after weeks and weeks of effort:

Even if you are house-bound due to illness or incapacitation, public sector bank officials need you to have powerful powers of persuasion to come to the house and attest your thumb print. You need to have a generous nature too. 

Where mutual funds are concerned, if you need to redeem money to pay for your unfortunate circumstances, the process is quite a challenge too. There is NO standardised procedure across the industry. For e.g.

• Some fund houses will send their representatives to the investor 's home and do an In Person Verification (IPV). These are few and far between. It will take over a week before you can redeem.
• Some require you to get a notary to notarise your redemption slip with all 3 stamps - the cost of getting said notary, the cost of the stamps can be heavy on your pocket.
• Some don't need all the 3 stamps, just the rubber stamp will do. Each additional stamp costs more.
• Some require you to get a banker's attestation that your thumb print is in reality yours. Now let's say your bank happens to be that reluctant public sector bank ?? what do you do?
• If your details are properly updated on the fund houses records, some allow you to go onto their website and redeem online- of course you must be net savvy and be able to type with your "able" hand and figure out the steps to follow. And not all fund houses are so enabled".

If you have shares in demat - sigh! That's a challenge I still haven't tackled. Am exhausted with all the activity so far - its taken my tired team from July 2017 till date just to get the fund houses sorted.  Hours galore on the phone which involved begging, cajoling and arguments. Reams of emails. I now am the proud owner of an extremely complex excel sheet listing each fund houses particular requirements.

Now that I have some breathing space, its been weighing on my mind - as someone who has been a part of the financial services industry for several years, I had the advantage of knowing key people in the industry. It still took months of tireless effort and dogged determination.  Most investors would interact at the counter staff level - who are not equipped to handle such cases - all you get is a runaround. In most cases, we had to escalate the case to the top brass. How would an ordinary investor manage this, whilst also coping with whatever reason got them to need to do this? 

All you single people out there, or those of you who keep your investments in your single name, I urge you to think about the hopefully unlikely situation where you cannot sign. 

I have thought about it incessantly, and I think I have come up with some options. If you would like to talk about it, am happy to share!