Health insurance room rent sub-limits must be clearly understood before purchasing a health cover else it can hut real bad. In this post, I describe my experience with my mother’s ear surgery and lessons on health insurance sub-limits – the disadvantages and advantages if any. What is a health insurance room rent sub-limit? This essentially means…
Continue reading →Here are 5 large cap funds that have beat the Nifty 100 Total Returns Index. Rather, only 5 out of 36 large cap funds studied in the Dec 2018 freefincal equity fund screener have managed to beat Nifty 100 consistently over 3, 4, 5 years in terms of risk and reward. I am quite surprised more than half the…
Continue reading →The NFO of ICICI Prudential India opportunities fund (open-ended) is set to open on Dec 26th 2018 (to Jan 9th 2018). This fund is a thematic special situations fund with high risk than a diversified equity fund. Here is why you should avoid this fund or wait and watch for it to perform. ICICI Prudential India…
Continue reading →Every December I take stock of my financial goals and evaluate where I stand. I have been publishing this since 2013 and this is the 6th edition and 1st video version. My goal is only to point out the benefits of goal-based investing and have no intentions to brag.My success so far (if it can…
Continue reading →Here are 11 aggressive hybrid (balanced) mutual funds that have beat Nifty 100!! The point is to illustrate how easy it is to get such fund shortlists using the freefincal mutual fund consistency screener. The Dec 2018 was published a couple of days ago. As readers may be aware, I have been comparing the performance of aggressive…
Continue reading →Here is a simple way to select your first stock without breaking your head using the Nifty Strategic Indices. These are a couple of videos published on freefincal @youtube and is along the lines of my lazy investing series. The idea is to help new stock investors to quickly pick stocks with minimal effort. Do have a…
Continue reading →In a circular issued today, Dec. 19th, the EPFO allowed members who have not been employed for at least one month to withdraw up to 75% of their provident corpus. The EPFO circular clearly states that after two months of continuous unemployment 100% of the corpus can be withdrawn. There has been some confusion in this…
Continue reading →If you are looking for mid cap and small cap value stocks or mid cap growth stocks, there is now an easy way to create a shortlist for further study. NSE has recently launched strategic indices based on Nifty 500 (100 large caps + 150 midcaps and 250 small caps) and Nifty 200 (100 large…
Continue reading →After a long wait, the department of posts (DOP) has finally announced the India Post Internet Banking facility! This is a welcome move as it will allow users, especially senior citizens and their children to manage the account. This is a step by step user guide to register for the post office net banking facility and…
Continue reading →This is a performance review of ICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund, one of the best-known value-oriented funds in the country. The fund has had a poor run in the last few years and has got many of its investors worried. This fund is partly why Sankaran Naren made a name for himself – he was the…
Continue reading →There is no compounding in mutual funds! Do not get fooled by “power of compounding”, “miracle of SIPs” and “8th wonder of the world” illustrations! The term “compounding” has no separate meaning than to represent compound interest. Since mutual funds offer no interest, the notion of compound interest or compounding does not apply to them. Here…
Continue reading →Interest in the Nifty Next 50 (NN50) has increased over the last couple of years due to its fantastic track record against many diversified equity mutual funds: Nifty Next 50: The Benchmark Index That No Mutual Fund Would Touch?! However, the NN50 is a volatile index with a huge peak to low falls (drawdown). So naturally, investors…
Continue reading →On Dec 9th, 2018, Fee-Only India, a community of SEBI registered pure fee-only advisors met in Bangalore (pictures below). As patrons of fee-only financial planning, they invited Ashal and me. This is the third fee-only meet and the second this year. The first was in Sep 2017 at Mumbai, the second in March at Hyderabad. It…
Continue reading →The union cabinet today has cleared five changes to the national pension scheme (NPS). The most important of which is that the NPS now has EEE status and the corpus that you can withdraw is tax-free. EEE means, that the money you invest in the scheme (up to a limit) is exempt income tax (1st…
Continue reading →This is a performance review of HDFC Hybrid Equity Fund and its old avatar HDFC Balanced. As we did last week with ICICI Prudential Equity & Debt Fund (ICICI Balanced), we shall use Nifty 100 TRI as the benchmark. We shall also use both ICICI Equity & Debt and ICICI Balanced Advantage as additional benchmarks. The idea…
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