Financial planning template: Create your own financial plan!

Create your own personal financial plan with this excel-based financial planning template. Ever since I made my first retirement calculator, I have had several requests to make an integrated financial plan creation tool. The only reason I took this long to make it is sheer boredom. I thought, since I had already made most of…

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Recurring Financial Goals Calculator

Financial goals maybe arranged into three categories. (a)   Goals based on a one-time expense. Classic example is a marriage. You invest to create a corpus, which evaporates around the time of the wedding.  Any event that is unlikely to occur again or occurs infrequently would fall in this category. For example, a child’s under-graduate and…

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Do not buy Gold ETFs because you need gold for your child’s marriage!

On occasions like Dhanteras and Akshaya Tritiya, AMCs and fund distributors advice you to start gold ETFs for financials goals like a child’s marriage. For some reason, many around us seem to think that one must start investing in gold-ETFs because gold is needed for our children’s (typically daughters!) marriage. As a result, many end…

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SIP Rolling Returns Analysis with Sensex Data

No matter how often we mention/promote/advertise that equity investments if continued over a long enough period would generate handsome returns, many investors seem to require constant reassurance and encouragement to continue their equity investments. A person who wishes to remain anonymous made the following SIP rolling returns analysis with Sensex data to provide his friends…

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IRR/XIRR – Excel – Limitations of Calculating Complex Cash Flow Returns

Excel’s IRR and XIRR functions are often used to calculate the rate of investment returns. In this post, let us discuss the limitations of XIRR and IRR functions. Credit:  This discussion is inspired by financial planner Mr. Hari who posted a video describing the limitations of IRR and XIRR on my XIRR calculator page. The video (a must…

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Planning For Intermediate-Term Financial Goals

PPFAS Long Term Value Fund is advertised with a tagline: Only for “truly” long term investors!  The funds scheme document states, “Investors should note that this scheme is suitable for investors who have an investment horizon of minimum 5 years”. Unfortunately,this can give investors the wrong notion that ‘long term’ implies duration of 5 years…

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Dealing With Complex Cash Flows -I: Chit Fund Returns Calculator

This calculator returns the CAGR value based on Chit fund cash flows using Excel’s XIRR and IRR functions. Even if you have no interest in chit funds (good for you!), if you are someone who uses Excel to calculate returns (of any financial instrument), I strongly urge you play with this calculator as it highlights…

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XLFinplan – Excel based Personal Financial Planning and Wealth Management Application

XLFinplan is an extraordinarily comprehensive Excel based financial planning application developed by Satish Mistry of Money Care Financial Planning Services. This commercial software has many interesting applications that will be useful not only for financial planners but also for individual investors. I requested Satish to send me a write up of the main features of…

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