Kid’s Education and You (KEY) is an initiative by SEBI registered investment advisor, Melvin Joseph to help children from low-income families with a monthly payment of Rs. 2000 from donors. The initiative now helps 260 children thanks to your support. A report and how you can be part of KEY to help out. On Aug…

In this guest post, R. Srivatsan discusses the importance of time and energy budgeting for financial success! Srivatsan would only like to be referred as a “long time reader” of freefincal. Regulars may recall that he wrote a wonderful guest post on the importance of looking at the earnings power of a stock: It’s Earnings That Count: Forget…

November is the best time to make resolutions, not January. If you keep at it regularly, it will become a habit that you cannot shake off by January. So what better day to start than Diwali?! Here are five important money steps that you can consider working on from today and perfect by Jan 2019….

Yes, that is right! Each time we get on the internet, search for information, get entertained, use social media, shop online, buy and sell stocks, pretty much anything, we are part of someones’ data experiment! Whether we like it or not, whether we consider it an infringement of privacy or not, we simply have no…

Every teachers’ day, I think about my third standard class teacher. She is a visionary. She looked me in the eye and said, “you will come to nothing in life” and that turned out to be true.  I have no idea what I did to make her so angry, but I still remember where I sat…

At work, I have the privilege of constantly interacting with gen-X (or Y/Z/AA!) – 18+, 20+ young adults coming to terms with an environment very different from school. It is natural to encounter students who are generally unhappy with life and existence. They first seem distracted in class. Then they stop coming and if you ask…

Impulse buying refers to the sudden purchase of goods and services without planning or without evaluating if it would be useful. It is the same as the sudden urge to pick up a packet of namkeen or sweets just because we have seen it! If you are worried about how you or someone you care about…

In Jue 2013, when freefincal had just completed one, I had written an account of how I came to be interested in money management and finance and my money mistakes. This is a mildly updated version for new readers, especially young earners who think they have “started late”. Trust me, when you look at my life,…

Here are some important business lessons from the box office collections of three movies released this year: The Mummy, Split and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. As a movie buff, I am also a box-office receipts buff and all money information is from www.boxofficemojo.com (as on June 28th 2017). Announcement: As readers may know…

Are you one of those guys who has trouble making money decisions? Join the biggest club on Earth! I have some good news and some more good news for you. The good news is that everyone is confused about one thing or the other – that is a certainty! The more good news is that…

Technological advances in the past 25 years have reduced information access time from days/hours to seconds. However, our ability to process this information has not changed much and if anything, has only decreased due to an information-excess. Yes, most of us are addicted and slowly drowning in information that we practically have no use for. …

A few years ago, I overheard some lab staff talking. A middle-aged person, soon to retire, was talking about the preparations for his daughter’s upcoming marriage. His aim was to outdo the reception arrangements he had observed in a recent marriage. I was invited to the event and found that it was extremely lavish for the…

Nearly 11 years ago, I sat down to face my IIT, Madras faculty interview. One of the faculty members who I knew from my student days sat beside me as he was waiting for his promotion interview. When he found out that was a particularly troubled time for me he said, “Pattu, I am glad that…

If you click on “images” after searching for “medicine side effects”, you will notice a t-shirt with a message that goes, “I take medication for diabetes which is a side-effect from my high BP which I got from taking sleeping tablets due to insomnia caused by anxiety which I got from a tablet given for…

A napkin drawing is a rough sketch drawn to effectively communicate an idea. It is called a napkin drawing or a back-of-the-envelope sketch because it can be done anywhere. Carl Richard’s napkin drawings are famous and he is an inspiration for me to attempt the same. A visual representation of a complex fact can be quite convincing….