An ultra short term mutual fund is a type of fixed income or debt mutual fund that invests in short-term bonds issued by banks, PSUs, corporate, cash and govt bonds. In this post, I discuss how and when to select ultra short term (UST) funds. First, wish you all a happy new. Second, Amazon has…
Continue reading →As 2016 draws to a close, a look at some of the personal finance developments that made a difference and the lessons from them. Before we begin, allow me to wish you a happy new year and pray for the ability to make informed decisions. If we get that right, the rest should take care of…
Continue reading →“FU Money” represents the amount required for a person to stop being employed. She is then free to follow her passion and wait for it to generate an income without having to worry about expenses for at least a few years. Or the corpus could be large enough to generate an inflation-protected income for the rest…
Continue reading →There has been a lot of confusion regarding the exit and withdrawals rules of the National Pension System (NPS). I apologise if I have contributed to it. In this post, I shall attempt to get rid of my own confusion and clarify my understanding. Until today I have incorrectly believed that 40% of the NPS corpus…
Continue reading →An interval income mutual fund or more generally, interval funds is a lesser known class of mutual funds that are open for subscription and redemption only at specified time intervals. A discussion about their main features and how to use them. An open-ended mutual fund allows purchase and redemptions on all business days. A closed-ended…
Continue reading →Each December, I conduct a personal financial audit. I take stock of my financial goals and other aspects of personal finance relevant to me. For the last three years, I have been sharing the gist of such audits at freefincal. The idea behind doing is this to put some context into the several goal based…
Continue reading →A mutual fund Fixed Maturity Plan (FMP) is a closed-ended debt mutual fund. A discussion on how and when to choose FMPs. A closed-ended mutual fund is one in which no purchase or redemption can be made after the new fund offer (NFO) period. The scheme has a fixed maturity date and unitholder can redeem…
Continue reading →One advice about investing in debt mutual funds that never made any kind of sense to me is: “pick a debt mutual fund whose maturity profile matches your investment horizon”. You will find this in many articles online and here is why I think it is plain wrong. Say you wanted to invest in a…
Continue reading →Here is an updated step-by-step user guide prepared by Anish Mohan to buy and sell direct mutual funds using the MF Utility portal – a free (as of now) “Transaction Aggregating Portal” run about 25 AMCs jointly. Whether you are considering getting a new account or already have one, this guide will help you understand the pros…
Continue reading →I would like to discuss the dangers of investing in debt mutual funds without understanding risks in the next few posts. There are two problems associated with putting all eggs in one basket and we only talk about one – the basket coming apart. The second and equally important problem is the search for the…
Continue reading →When it comes to an actively managed market linked instrument, the ideas of downside protection and upside performance are easy enough to understand and expect. In particular, with respect to active mutual funds, downside protection refers to the fund’s losses when compared to benchmark losses. For example, during a period in which the benchmark dropped by…
Continue reading →Last week I had posted a comparison of large cap funds with few relevant indices. This time let us do the same with mid-cap funds – compare SIP and Lump Sum returns over the last 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 years. As before, a passive mutual fund is just an index (either cap-based or strategic). The expenses associated with…
Continue reading →An exposure to equity is not necessary to beat inflation or finance our future if we know how to account for inflation by other means. It is merely a choice. Many of us did not have any equity exposure when we started managing our money. We read about it; thought it might a be a…
Continue reading →The corpus obtained when buying “low” or when the Nifty is below its 200 day moving average (dma) is compared with the corpus from buying “high” (nifty above 200 dma). Apologies for yet another post on this subject, but I had to satisfy my curiosity. Kindly bear with me. Before we begin a clarification on nomenclature. As we…
Continue reading →The previous two studies on buying “low” vs. buying “systematically” pointed to the surprising regularity with which systematic investing does better (or at least as well as – good enough). In response to this, many suggested that in order to ensure buying “low” wins, I should ensure the cash that is put away waiting for…
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