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…
Continue reading →This index fund screener is based on tracking error and returns difference wrt benchmarks (aka tracking difference). The screener will help users evaluate how efficiently an index fund has tracked its underlying benchmark. It will also help to understand how tracking a midcap index or the Nifty 100, 500 differs from tracking the Sensex or…
Continue reading →I am Alok, 31 years old, a Group A officer in the central government, and this is my journey to financial independence. I have a 3-year-old child. My wife is a housewife. I joined the service in August 2015. While joining, I had 14000 in my account and nothing else. My starting salary was around…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →This ETF screener is based on tracking errors and tracking differences (ETF return minus index return). The screener will help users evaluate how efficiently an ETF has tracked its underlying benchmark. The tracking error is the ETF’s standard deviation minus index monthly return differences. The lower the tracking error, the more efficient the ETF is…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Many individuals close to retirement are unfamiliar with buying government bonds vis RBI Retail Direct and how it differs from purchasing a life insurance pension plan*. We discuss the essential differences in this article. In this article, a life insurance pension plan refers to an immediate annuity plan, not a deferred one. Always avoid deferred…
Continue reading →In 2008, my expenses dropped to ‘normal’ levels after my father passed away (post a prolonged battle with cancer). By then, I had been in a regular position for less than two years, taking stock of my cash flow and investible surplus (money net of all expenses). Immature me, I remember asking my mom a…
Continue reading →The latest freefincal Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener is now available. Use it to screen for consistently performing equity mutual funds. You can screen based on fund category & benchmark and spot mutual funds with a higher return than a benchmark at a lower risk. Inside, you get discounted links to our robo advisory tool…
Continue reading →A reader says, ” How did you manage your emotions for all those years when you had negative or zero returns? I always had this question about your investing journey. How could you keep faith that it will all turn positive one day? I wouldn’t have done it for so many years. Did some sane…
Continue reading →This article addresses common misconceptions about the National Pension Scheme (NPS) by government and private subscribers. Update: This article was conceived before the announcement of the Unified Pension Scheme (UPS). The misconceptions remain unchanged. Though I am eligible for the UPS, I am partial to the NPS and quite emotionally attached to my NPS corpus!…
Continue reading →This article discusses income laddering (aka annuity laddering) in retirement planning and how to go about it. There are two extreme options in retirement planning: one where the corpus is managed in a diversified portfolio, and an increasing income is withdrawn from it as required. This is known as the bucket strategy. We had earlier…
Continue reading →This is a National Pension Scheme Fund Screener to shortlist consistently performing NPS schemes. You can also spot NPS schemes with a higher return than a benchmark at a lower risk. This is similar in design to the freefincal Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener. Inside, you get discounted links to our robo advisory tool and…
Continue reading →A reader says, “Suppose my total investment in a mutual fund is Rs. 12,000, and its current market value is Rs. 17,000. If I redeem Rs. 8000, how do I calculate the current total investment?” Each time we invest in a mutual fund (or stock), we buy units at market price. Each time we redeem,…
Continue reading →Let us discuss a retirement plan for a 28-year-old who wishes to retire by age 50. These are the following inputs and assumptions used in the retirement calculation. Age 28; Retirement age 50; Life expectancy age 90; Monthly expenses Rs. 40,000; Current corpus is practically zero; Inflation before retirement: 7% and after retirement 6%, Return…
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