My mother retired 13 years ago and started receiving a pension that was indexed to inflation. Not only did it increase twice a year, thanks to DA hikes, it also increased as a result of pay commissions. The average year on year growth of her pension is close to 13%. This is an astounding number…
Continue reading →The average, also known as the arithmetic average or the mean of a set of values is a nice and simple number that is easy to calculate and interpret. However, it not valid under all circumstances and must be used with caution. Given a set of numbers, we cannot blindly calculate the average – take the…
Continue reading →Are you worried the high expense ratios of active mutual funds? Are you looking for an index fund that has performed reasonably well with low expenses? Then you can consider a Nifty Next 50 index fund instead of active funds in the multi-cap category. Why? As pointed out in a series of posts on the Nifty Strategy…
Continue reading →Here is an Excel stock screener to scan & filter Indian stocks with multiple criteria. Cap-wise screening & sector-wise screening possible. It gets data from Value Research and allows the user to screen capitalization-wise and sector-wise. I have always wanted to build a stock screener and hence this sheet. I am well aware that they are…
Continue reading →Here is a free stock analysis spreadsheet that can automatically process balance sheet data from screener.in. This is the 12th edition of the freefincal automated stock analyzer. The previous versions used MorningStar.in financial data. However, since I received requests to make a spreadsheet that can process screener.in data, I thought I will give it a try….
Continue reading →Never hold your mutual fund units in demat form! In this post, Anish Mohan draws from personal experience to explain why dematerialisation is a terrible idea with no benefits whatsoever! What is Dematerialisation? Dematerialisation is the process by which a physical certificate of holding a share or bond or mutual fund unit is converted into an “electronic…
Continue reading →We all that know that one can invest up to Rs. 1.5L under section 80 to save tax*. However, are we making the best use of section 80C for tax saving? Have we cluttered the portfolio in the name of saving tax? Is tax saving an integral part of our goal planning portfolios? Here is an…
Continue reading →Last week, Mr. Srinivasan Sundarajan shared with us how he had converted his company group health insurance to a family floater as per IRDA’s portability rules. In this follow-up post, he describes his experience after porting from the group cover to a family floater. I believe his account would be quite useful for anyone with or…
Continue reading →Ever wondered why the retirement corpus we need is so large? Often unbelievably so. Is this a mistake in the math, in the assumptions or in the inputs? In this post, let us a discuss a simple illustration of a retirement calculation in order to understand why the corpus required is so large. Any calculation…
Continue reading →Here is a personal financial self-evaluation checklist that can be used by beginners and veterans alike. It has been developed from how to Conduct a Personal Financial Audit and my own audits which are done each December. Here are the links to my 2015, 2014 and 2013 personal finance audits. If you like the checklist, you can attempt answering and act on them…
Continue reading →I see more and more young earners trying to manage the retirement corpus of their parents. In a way, this is healthy and in a way dangerous. Let us face it. Most retirement corpuses are not healthy enough. In the sense that one cannot wield them to generate an inflation-protected post-retirement income. This is especially…
Continue reading →A question that is often asked is, “should I buy a personal health insurance policy if I have a company health cover?” The standard answer to this* was, “yes, you should, as you could lose the company cover at any time”. * The answer if often laced with conflict of interest as the guys who…
Continue reading →IRDA portability rules allow an individual to convert the group insurance cover offered by an employer to an individual policy from the same insurer. During the 6th Bangalore DIY investor meet (July 31st 2016), Mr. Srinivasan Sundarajan pointed out that he had made such a switch. When I requested him to recount his experience, pros and cons…
Continue reading →We had discussed Why the retirement corpus we need is so large in an earlier post. Using a retirement calculator for the first time can be a nightmarish experience. Many users have complained that the low-stress retirement calculator is low-stress before using it and high-stress after! I would like to think much of this stress is due to a lack of…
Continue reading →“If I have a lump sum, what is the best way to invest it in an equity mutual fund?”, is a question that I am asked repeatedly. In this post, let us discuss simple ways to invest a lump sum in an equity mutual fund. Lump sum in a debt mutual fund Let us first get…
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