Insurance is always a grudge purchase. Homeowners insurance is particularly so, because the chance of you losing your house and all of its contents is really very small.

The risk, however, is not in the probability of it happening, but the scale of the loss if it did. It would be immensely difficult to recover from losing your property and everything in it if it were uninsured.

Since the world is such a complex place, our minds want to simplify things for us. Very often, we do this by reducing issues to just two opposites: in or out. Up or down. Black or white.

In investing, the opposites that many people focus on are whether they are underperforming or outperforming some sort of benchmark. Since it is an easy thing to check, they use it as a gauge of comfort.

Creating intuitive client journeys enabled by technology is one of Santam’s strategic building blocks as part of our efforts in building a FutureFit Santam. In pursuit of this strategic intent to deliver on stakeholder expectations now and into the future, we are thrilled to launch WhatsApp as a brand-new channel for our clients. 

This new WhatsApp functionality enables self-service for policy documentation requests as well as claims services. With this convenient and instant self-service at the clients’ fingertips, policy documents can be requested instantaneously anytime, anywhere, and claims can be registered and tracked from the palm of their hand.

Source:  Santam |  Andrew Coutts

We all knew that the Covid-19 pandemic would upend everything, and now there is much speculation (and no certainty) as to why Americans are resigning from their jobs in “huge, unprecedented numbers”. Whether or not the same trend will now be mirrored in the rest of the world, “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold” – investors should always keep an eagle eye on what happens in the world’s largest economy.

Have a read of “People are acting strangely” on Cherryflava. The nub is that “economists are very confused as to why this is happening and apparently nobody forecast this as a potential future reality when lockdowns first hit… Nobody.”

How do you invest in such an uncertain time? Let us help you tailor a strategy personalised to your needs, mindful of the high levels of unpredictability that underlie our “new normal”.

Manpreet Gill - Standard Chartered:

“[In the global financial crisis] the global equity index fell almost 60% from its October 2007 peak to its March 2009 trough.

“Looking back at history, we now know that the correct action for a buy-and-hold investor with a multi-decade horizon would have been to do nothing. However, amid the screaming headlines at the time, would we honestly have been able to avoid making the mistake of selling some, or all, of our holdings in panic?

“In today’s bull market....