In this article, SEBI-registered flat fee-only financial advisor Swapnil Kendhe discusses how we can implement a unified portfolio approach for all our long-term goals. About the author: Swapnil is a SEBI Registered Investment Advisor and is one of the sought-after advisors on the freefincal fee-only financial planners’ list. You can learn more about him and his…

A reader asks, “Our daughter is five months old. How should we start investing for her future?” It is always best to start planning on a clean slate before making any investment.  Let’s dive straight into the goal-planning steps. The goal-planning steps We need a target corpus after 17/18 years, depending on when she was…

A reader asks, “Is it possible to use PPF as a source of regular income? For example, withdraw 7 per cent per year”. Once a PPF account has completed 15 years, there are two ways to keep it alive: (1) Without further contributions (interest will be paid) and (2) with contributions (Rs. 500  min per…

A reader says, “For a salaried employee contributing to an employee PF, would it be good advice to invest 50% of take-home pay first into PPF and the remainder into an index fund? This would be an investment towards a retirement corpus. The EPF and PPF would be the fixed-income part of the corpus, and…

A reader asks, “What are the differences between finfluencers and financial experts? Is there any way to distinguish them? How can investors be wary of finfluencers?” Definitions for both types are subjective, and these are mine: A finfluencer has a good understanding of the kind of content that would be lapped by consumers (viewers/readers/listeners) and…

For a long term goal, invest about 60% in equity and the rest in fixed income. Three years before the goal deadline, start reducing equity allocation. This is the usual advice peddled around by “experts”. How successful is this idea against a rigorous backtest? As you might guess, this is just arbitrary gyan, and if…

A reader asks, “I would like to go abroad on holiday once in two years. How do I plan for this without affecting my other long-term investments?”. Our robo-advisor tool has a recurring financial goal calculator module, which you can use to plan for all such goals. This can also be used to plan annual…

A reader says, ” I am 35 years old, and I started my “equity” investments quite late (around 2021 when I was 33). Until then, debt instruments and real estate have been my primary investments for my retirement. So debt in my retirement portfolio has a major weightage at about 70%.” “I would like to…

A reader asks, ” What should I consider as the average inflation rate for the next 25 years? RBI indicates an average of 4% but in a band of 2% to 6%.” Assuming this is the inflation estimate before retirement, there are some considerations. 1. The inflation estimate is not set in stone. It is…

Many financial experts believe introducing the new tax regime (NTR) has destroyed the habit of saving. But does this make any sense? The NTR has no section 80C benefits like the old tax regime. So they believe that those who were forced to buy tax-saving products and forced to “save tax” (that is lower than…

A reader wishes to retire with an ongoing home loan EMI and asked us how to plan for this using the freefincal robo advisor tool — a discussion. First, some general considerations. Retiring in the middle of a home loan service may seem odd to many readers. However, it is quite common. For example, SBI…

Occasionally, we ask members of our YouTube community to post questions about investing and personal finance. Here are some of them with brief answers. Q: Sir, for a 30-year-old person who has never invested in MF, which MF is suitable for a lump sum amount for the long term? A: 50% of Sensex or Nifty…

This is an updated list of calculators available for members of the freefincal investor circle. This is an exclusive space for investors, advisors, fintech employees and students to access financial planning and insurance tools, mutual fund and stock analysis tools, coding strategies and Excel macros for data extraction. The resources can be used for investment…