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Petra Trust MD urges workers to invest in 3rd tier pension schemes

Friday, 5 February 2016 / No Comments

Kofi Fynn - Managing Director of Pensions Service Provider, Petra Trust
Endeavour to invest in the 3rd tier voluntary pension schemes if you want to enjoy the special incentives in the 3-tier Pension scheme, that is the advice to workers in both the formal and informal sectors by Kofi Fynn – the Managing Director of Pensions Service Provider, Petra Trust.

The 1st and 2nd tier schemes are patronised more because they are mandatory. But Mr. Fynn says workers need to add the 3rd tier to benefit from the pre-tax savings provision in the Pensions Law. He explained this to JOY BUSINESS at the launch of his company’s investment product called ‘Savings Booster’.

Most Ghanaians know about the tier 1, which is managed by SSNIT and tier 2 which is a contributory pension just as the tier 3.

However, the tier 3 products which are long-term savings products created under the Pension Act of 2008 (Act 766) is not known by many even though it has enormous benefits.

The most significant advantage of tier 3 he said is that it is tax-beneficial as well, just as Tier 1 and 2 but allows an individual to make contributions into a personal pension scheme without taxes being accessed on that contribution.

“In effect what the government is saying is that if you’re willing to even try to save for the long term we are not going to take taxes from you on that amount. Those taxes can be added to the savings thereby, boosting your returns hence, the name of our product which is ‘Savings Booster,’” he stressed.

He explained that when one makes a savings booster contribution and is from a payroll there are no taxes to it and so the money one would have paid as tax would then be added to that savings hence, putting the contributor ahead even before the investment begun. “If you made any other kind of investments what you are going to have to take is money that have already been taxed so for example if you are in the 20 percent tax bracket, and you wanted to invest a 100 Cedis, only 80 Cedis of that will be available for investment because the government takes 20 Cedis as tax, with Savings Booster all 100 can be invested so that even before you begin, you are ahead of other kinds of investment products” emphasized.

The 3rd tier voluntary pension scheme Mr. Fynn indicated is most secure given that it is regulated by the National Pensions Regulatory Authority and therefore, ensures a very high level of quality in the investments made, and a very high level of discipline that brings about safety to ensure that it is a good product for clients.

So we are talking here about high returns in the product itself, a boost that is coming from the additional tax savings, and proper regulation by the NPRA.

The instruments that we invest in are similar to what other investment vehicles would invest in, except that we are regulated by NPRA hence the quality levels of our investments is very high.

Source: My Joyonline

The Guy who bought Google.com from under Google's Nose - Google Paid $12,000.00 To Get It Back

Sunday, 31 January 2016 / No Comments
Sanmay Ved.
Google.com, one of the most valuable domains on the Internet, was mistakenly sold for $12 last fall.

Google paid $12,000 to get it back. The buyer was a former Googler, Sanmay Ved, who discovered Google.com on the list of domains available for sale on September 29. He bought it, charging the $12 fee to his Discover card, never really expecting the transaction to go through.

"I was hoping I would get an error at sometime saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!" he wrote in a post on LinkedIn last fall.

He told CNNMoney he made the purchase simply out of curiosity. "I thought at some point in time it would block me out, but I wanted to see how far it would go," he said.

Google offered to pay $6,006.13 to Sanmay Ved, who bought the Google.com domain for $12. It ended up paying twice that amount to a charity he picked.

The transaction did go through - for about a minute. He said during that brief time he got a flood of information from Google users, though he was not able actually change the Google home page. Then he got an e-mail from Google canceling the transaction.

Ved worked for 5-1/2 years at Google, according to his LinkedIn page, and likes the company enough to have its logo as his profile picture on Facebook. He is now an MBA student at Babson College in suburban Boston.

Google (GOOGL, Tech30) admits Ved owned the domain, albeit very temporarily. The company said that it offered him $6006.13, which is a numerical version of the word Google. "Squint a little and you'll see it," the company said in blog post about the incident.

When Google learned that Ved didn't intend to keep the money but instead donate it to charity, the company doubled the reward. Ved, who is from India, directed that the money be given to the Art of Living India Foundation. The group runs free schools in parts of that country where poverty and child labor are widespread.

Google regularly pays people who discover security problems with its systems and notifies the company. It said the largest single award it paid last year was $37,500 to an Android security researcher. (We assume that's a human, not a humanoid robot who performs security research. But given how strange and quirky this entire story is, who knows).

Source: CNNMoney