A reader (age: 41, spouse, 36, wants to retire asap) wants to know, “What should be my retirement corpus if my current monthly expenses are Rs 1 lakh?” We shall use the freefincal Robo Advisor tool to consider some scenarios. 1. Current monthly expenses that will persist in retirement: Rs. 1,00,000. We can exclude expenses…
Continue reading →Home loan borrowers make this common mistake. For a Rs. 50 Lakh home loan payable over 20 years at 8% interest, the EMI is Rs. 41,822. As is well known, much of the EMI initially is interest. It is incorrect to sum the total interest paid (Rs. 50,37,281 in this case) and claim that as…
Continue reading →Section 54F gives an exemption from long-term capital gains arising from the transfer of a long-term capital asset that is not a residential house if the proceeds are used to purchase or construct a residential house in India. The key is that the gain must be a long-term capital gain for Section 54F to be…
Continue reading →This is a National Pension Scheme Fund Screener to shortlist consistently performing NPS schemes. You can also identify NPS schemes that offer a higher return than the benchmark while maintaining 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…
Continue reading →A reader asks, “I will be earning around ₹10 lakh as business income in FY 2025–26. Additionally, if I earn ₹2 lakh as gains from debt mutual funds. I’m confused about how these debt fund gains will be taxed this financial year.” “Here are two versions of what I’ve come across online: Some sources claim…
Continue reading →We publish a list of stocks with low volatility and momentum each month. We provide data for BSE 500 and BSE 100 stocks. There are now three different screener files available. (1) Stocks with low volatility and momentum from the BSE 100 large cap universe are available as a separate file (2) Stocks with low…
Continue reading →Over the past few weeks, many readers have asked us, “Can I invest in Zerodha Multi Asset Passive FoF?” – A discussion. Before we begin, it is worth noting that many investors appear to lack an understanding of the distinction between a passive fund and a passive fund of funds. A passive fund tracks a…
Continue reading →In October 2022, we explained why we badly need an aggressive hybrid index fund! The situation remains the same ten months after SEBI announced a Mutual Funds Lite (MF Lite) framework for passively managed schemes of Mutual Funds, which includes passive Hybrid Funds. We determine how easy/hard it is to beat the CRISIL Hybrid 35+65…
Continue reading →In response to our recent articles on the performance of active mid-cap and small-cap funds versus the Nifty Midcap 150*, a viewer on YouTube suggested that 5-year rolling returns are insufficient to judge these funds, as they are typically recommended for longer periods. We should look at longer periods. These are the articles: Active Small…
Continue reading →“Dividends are unethical. They give you the impression that you are getting something extra from the fund. However, you are not. The dividend is just your returns being given back to you.” – Parag Parikh, in the first unitholder meet held in Chennai and Mumbai, Nov 2014. Sources: this author, who attended the Chennai meet…
Continue reading →One of the first SEBI-registered investment advisors in the country, Melvin Joseph, is an amazing person. In 2018, he launched his movement to educate underprivileged children called Kids’ Education and You (KEY). A monthly investment of Rs. 2000 towards this cause will change lives and reward you in bear or bull markets! No better day…
Continue reading →The Ulcer Index is a measure of downside risk in actively managed mutual funds. It is a simple way to find out how stressful it is to hold a fund compared to a benchmark. Investors can make the analysis shown using the tools in the freefincal investor circle (details below). Context: The standard deviation (volatility)…
Continue reading →I was recently asked what tools and platforms you use for investing. I never stopped to think about it before. So, I did it in the hope that it may be of some interest to the reader. As older readers would know, I invest in NPS (mandatory), PPF (just enough to keep it alive and…
Continue reading →A retirement bucket strategy is an approach by which the retirement corpus is split into 3-4 buckets of varying risk. As retirement progresses and market conditions change, the retiree is expected to manage the buckets. That is, transfer money from one bucket to another to ensure the expenses (indexed to inflation, with some room for…
Continue reading →These are the freefincal handpicked list of mutual funds. New and old investors can use it according to their specific needs. The list, titled “PlumbLine,” has been published since September 2017 to help beginners use the freefincal robo advisor tool. Most importantly, Plumbline is a mix of my opinions, skin in the game (where I…
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