How to select mutual fund categories suitable for your financial goals?

You might be wondering why the title refers to mutual fund ‘categories’.  Would it not be more enticing and perhaps more useful had it read, ‘how to select mutual funds suitable for your financial goals’? Perhaps so.  However, I choose to focus on how to select mutual fund categories first, for two reasons I am…

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Imbibe, Implement, Ignore:Suggested New Year Resolutions for Investors

To me, personal finance is nothing more than common sense.  Commonsense is simply nothing but mathematics expressed in a spoken language. Before I started the blog, I knew nothing about investor behaviour and aspects of behavioural finance.  It was irrelevant to me. Now I find myself learning about the different ways in which people handle…

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Visualizing Mutual Fund Volatility Measures

Mutual fund investments are subject to market risk!  Haven’t we heard that one before?! If we wish to analyze the performance of a mutual fund, we should know how to evaluate returns and how to evaluate volatility. Volatility, not risk. Risk pertains to your financial goal.  Volatility pertains to the instrument. There are many ways to…

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Financial planning template: Create your own financial plan!

Create your own personal financial plan with this excel-based financial planning template. Ever since I made my first retirement calculator, I have had several requests to make an integrated financial plan creation tool. The only reason I took this long to make it is sheer boredom. I thought, since I had already made most of…

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Retirement Planning: letter to a prospective client

Nandish Desai and Manish Chauhan run Jagoadvisor – a portal for financial advisors. Recently, they posed the following retirement planning challenge, Scenario: ‘You meet a 55 year old with a corpus of Rs. 70 lakhs. The person seeks financial independence in retirement and expects an annual inflation of about 8-9%. He would like to invest the corpus in…

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