This is the archive of all our articles related to goal-based investing
Here is a list of âqualificationsâ necessary to do your own financial planning. This is not a âfind a financial planner, if you cannot find the time to do it yourself, post! I am writing this for two reasons: out of irritation and fear. I am irritated that time and again financial planners and mutual…
Continue reading →A chronic illness is a condition that cannot be cured, but can be âmanagedâ with periodic monitoring and medicines. âWhat is the cost of managing such an illness for life?â Subra suggested that I make a calculator to answer this question. It is well known that chronic illnesses are on the increase. Every third or…
Continue reading →Each December, I conduct a personal financial audit. That is, I take stock of , financial goals what is the value of my investments for each goal. What is their worth? have I invested what I resolved to invest last December? Will I have enough to invest for all my goals in the year ahead? Review calculations…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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 childâs under-graduate and…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Excelâs IRR and XIRR and simple but excellent tools to estimate the returns from a periodic investment in a volatile instruments (eg. Mutual fund SIP). Unfortunately, two issues affect its usage: Â Bug(s) of unknown origin that make it give the wrong result sometimes. Read more about this here: XIRR: A Bug? (Thanks to financial planner…
Continue reading →Inflation â a gradual decrease in purchasing power with time â affects all human beings. The average inflation in India is more than twice the average inflation in the US. Will inflation in India ever increase?  Many seem to believe that after a long time (say a couple of decades later) inflation will decrease, as…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Excelâs 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…
Continue reading →PPFAS Long Term Value Fund is advertised with a tagline: Only for “truly” long term investors! Â The funds scheme document states, âInvestors should note that this scheme is suitable for investors who have an investment horizon of minimum 5 yearsâ. Unfortunately,this can give investors the wrong notion that âlong termâ implies duration of 5 years…
Continue reading →This calculator returns the CAGR value based on Chit fund cash flows using Excelâs 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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Does this question sound familiar? Bet it does. This is probably one of the most popular questions asked in any investor meet or television show. The answer is surprisingly simple and the reaction to the answer, in most cases, unsurprisingly indifferent. In academic circles we have a saying. ‘No question is silly. However, some answers…
Continue reading →When gold prices fell steeply earlier this year, we were flooded with ‘told you so’ articles. No one seemed bothered at that time to emphasise that gold is meant for long term investing only, and that such volatility is natural. Before the crash everyone was saying, ‘buy golf ETFs’, ‘allocate 10% of your portfolio to…
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