This will only impact those which trade regularly and don’t hold a portfolio of shares. It will also impact new shareholders yet to build a portfolio and/or those that don’t have their CHESS managed by CommSec. As…
Shares you already own will also be automatically added to your trading limit. We will double the market value of your registered CHESS sponsored holdings and add it to your daily trading limit. If you are CHESS sponsored with CommSec, you can view your holdings by logging in to your account and selecting “Portfolio” in the main menu.
This may be a change with CommSec but this has always been the case with my online broker. You want to buy something, you have to have the money up-front. You don’t want to have the money up-front then you can use margin lending but that would need prior approval. In other words, the limit is $0 regardless of whether buying a leading or non-leading stock.
Maybe CommSec is just bringing its practices more in line with the rest of the industry.
(I am taking the word “trades” in the above quote to mean “buy trades”. Clearly you don’t need any cash to execute a sell trade on shares that you own.)
Anyone who buys shares without the intention of having the money to pay for them i.e. under the assumption that the price will rise before settlement is a gambler not an investor, or they are doing insider trading, and deserves what they get (good or bad).
Perhaps a cautionary reminder … don’t accept the default travel insurance. It is usually better to make an explicit choice of the travel insurance that suits the traveller.
However even with better travel insurance, the insurance company will usually wriggle out of it if the event is not covered by the Terms and Conditions, which are of course a zillion legalese pages long.
The failure of the travel insurance doesn’t necessarily mean that the family can’t get compensation, since at the end of the day some company (the tour company) may still be liable for the death - but pursuing that can be a more difficult experience than claiming on insurance, particularly when the death occurred overseas.
It is also possible that the deceased may have had life insurance and that is the most likely to pay out.
You are probably right on this as many Life policies often exclude risky activities from coverage and it might be that walking in or around an active Volcano is considered one such risky exclusion. Super accounts will probably be the safest bet on gaining a payout if they had one or any.
Insurance in a super account would reflect commercial policies so maybe or maybe not from that; the value of the super account whether defined benefit or account based should definitely have value although not the value of an expected insurance payout that would have been above that amount.
My policy PDS is 148 pages long but as far as I can see the exclusions for paying out on death are:
if you commit suicide within a specified timeframe of taking out the policy (or within that same timeframe of increasing the insured amount then that increase would be excluded)
a general ban on paying out anything at all if it would breach AML/CTF laws.
So I guess they would have to prove that walking in or around an active volcano was an exciting way of committing suicide (which under the actual circumstances of the tourist cited above would not stand up in court for the insurance company).
There is another angle. When you apply for life insurance, they will ask you about your participation in certain high risk recreational pursuits. If you failed to disclose that and then subsequently that pursuit caused your death, they might decline to pay out on the grounds that you failed to disclose a material particular (or indeed were untruthful in your application). If you disclosed it and they accepted your application, with or without a premium loading, then I would guess that you are covered even if the pursuit subsequently caused your death.
However life insurance is not relevant to the actual circumstances here. They are attempting to claim on travel insurance, which no doubt has its own lengthy PDS.
There have been numerous prior assurances of action by Government to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Banking, Insurance and Finance. A number of organisations including Choice stood by the recommendations.
That approach seems to be deeply embedded in ‘Australianism’ where efforts are made to remedy ‘in the middle’ rather than hold a miscreant responsible and making a victim whole. It permeates law from giving lesser sentences for pleading guilty and fines without convictions for criminal offences to the way the civil tribunals work, to the ACCC negotiating fines and penalties rather than assessing and applying them, that the tribunals have no enforcement power so the litigant has to then go to court, to whatever.
Our government is comprised of small government every person for themselves types and Australia gets what it votes for, and because of historic patterns it must be what we want in preference (pun intended) to what the ‘other side’ might do.
The author of that piece has jumped from: this change could be used to take the pressure off financial institutions, to this change means the end of western civilisation as we know it - with no explanation. Yes it does seem odd to expect a regulatory authority to assist with growth but I see no reason to assume that this goal will be put in front of all others and result in ASIC being entirely neutered. As for such action “throwing the banking royal commission under a bus” this is more hyperbolic than I would expect from a lecturer in law.
It does appear that ASIC and other ‘regulatory window dressing’ style agencies often require the equivalent of IVF to get going. Even then sometimes it takes, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Ho hum. The accidentally run twice batch process happens so often that banks are good at detecting it when it happens and undoing the second run before most customers even notice. Most of the time anyway.
Re the first article … it does seem as if it is going to be controversial, and could potentially see some minor alterations to the law (i.e. insurer not permitted to send letter of demand to tenant unless the insurer reasonably believes that the tenant acted recklessly, negligently or deliberately).
It should be mentioned that insurance has always worked this way. If you take out insurance, the insurer pays you out and then tries to find out who is actually responsible and recover some or all of the money from that party or that party’s insurer. The process of recovery can take years, including going via the courts. One of the benefits to you of insurance is that they take on all of that time, effort and expense on your behalf.
If state governments are of a mind to do anything then another direction to go in would be to require tenants to take out insurance for damage that they do. (Obviously the bond is completely insufficient when the tenant manages to do $78,000 worth of damage.)
That would bring it into line with the way that cars work, at least as far as CTP goes. It’s compulsory. Everyone has it. So when it all goes pear-shaped, the insurance companies work out who is responsible, to what extent, fighting it out in the court system if necessary, and neither driver has to worry about it.
Banks are refusing services to adult industry businesses.
Is it just about the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to moral judgements or is it that the banks do not want any competition when it comes to screwing customers?
This undermines the government’s push to ban cash altogether. The government can’t have it both ways. They should either legislate to require banks to offer non-credit banking services to all-comers, on a non-discriminatory basis, for any person or business engaged in a lawful activity or forget about trying to ban cash.
but as far as I can see the exclusions for paying out on death are:
