‘Conflict of interest’ is a concept poorly understood by most Indians: from the dislodged BCCI chairman for obvious reasons to a school teacher offering private tuition. Conflict of interest also looms large in the Indian financial advisory business. I would bet that more than 95% of financial advisors get remuneration of some sort from mutual…

I am not a fan of international women’s day (8th March). I think it is condescending and insulting to women. The biggest mistake one can do is to compartmentalize human behaviour in terms of sex, religion, ethnicity etc. That said, today gives me an excuse to acknowledge one of the most impressive personal finance blogs…

When you invest in a mutual fund a percentage of what you earn as returns is subtracted to pay for the fund manager, fund distributor, advertising and other expenses. This is referred to as expense ratio. For example if you invest Rs. 1 lakh in a fund and if the fund returns 10% in a…

This insurance with goal planner allows you to determine: 1. the insurance amount need to secure college and marriage expenses of two children 2. the amount need to save for college and marriage expenses 3. insurance amount need to provide inflation adjusted monthly expenses for the family and school expenses for two children It provides…

This calculator is inspired by a couple of posts (links below) on retirement by Subramoney. It allows you to guess how much you need for financial independence during retirement  and computes the corresponding pension or how long the corpus will last if it has to match future expenses indexed to inflation. It also calculates the…

Portfolio rebalancing refers to the realignment of the asset allocation of a portfolio (% in stock/equity, % in bonds/debt) back to the original asset allocation planned for the investment. This is done to control risk and  increase the potential for returns. You can read more about this here: http://invest-it-yourself.com/rebalancing.php I have developed a portfolio simulator…

Imagine having a corpus big enough to generate enough money to handle all your annual expenses while still growing to keep pace with inflation for your lifetime! You would then be financially free! Of course you will have to be free of debt as well. You are then ready to retire or work whenever you want!…

Thinking of taking a car loan? Hold it right there! Did you know that the value of a brand new car depreciates by 20% when you drive out of the showroom! Add to this a 15% depreciation in value each year (assuming normal wear and tear) the govt recommends! This implies in the first few…

You can use this calculator to determine the compounded annualized growth rate on your investments like endowment policies, ULIPS, Chit funds or any investments where you have made some payments and received some money either periodically or as a lump sum at the end. You will be surprised how easy it is to calculate this using…

Say you have investment period of 15 years and you want to invest: i)  Rs. 1000 for 3 years @ 10% interest each year ii)  Rs. 5000 for next 5 years @ 8% interest each year iii) Rs. 9000 for next 7 years @ 7% interest each year how much will you accumulate? Find out…