The Chief Marketing Officer of Databank has advised investors to set up separate accounts for their long- and short-term needs.
According to Ms Gillian Hammah, clients could segment their needs and create different investment accounts from which they can withdraw, to meet their obligations when need be.
Ms Hammah, thus, suggested Databank’s Money Market Fund (MFund) as the best product for these twin purposes.
She said the MFund “will be able to take care of those [recurrent] needs while building up something else for emergencies, because as for emergencies, one can never predict when they will occur. So, have an account to meet those recurring expenditures and have a separate account to meet emergency needs.”
She said the MFund was a flexible package, given that in addition to allowing for investments in the long-term, it could be used as a short-term investment vehicle to meet emergency needs and can also be employed to build up funds towards a specific project within 6-12 months. MFund, she added, allowed an investor to access his funds “within 24 hours or one working day”.
To be able to segregate emergent needs from non-emergent obligations, she suggested investors draw up a clear list of what things constitute emergencies for them.
“People should define what an emergency is; in that case, if something comes up and it’s not on one’s list of emergencies, then there’s no need to look for funds to meet those,” Ms Hammah noted.
She also advocated discipline on the part of investors to overcome the temptation of dipping their hands into their investments for “frivolous” reasons. She said withdrawing at will, from one’s investments, often led to bankruptcy, compelling one to borrow from relatives and friends or fall on loans at high interest rates from a financial institution, which leaves one in perpetual debt.
