Thanks mainly to personal finance bloggers, more and more individuals are recognising to the need to treat inflation as the benchmark for long-term goals. With this comes the inevitable realisation that investments that have an insurance component in them – endowment plans, money-back plans, traditional with-profit plans and market-linked ULIPs etc. are unlikely to help…
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. Last years audit can be found here. This year, as a forerunner to this post, I had written about how to conduct a personal financial audit and invited readers to conduct one themselves….
Continue reading →The Excel stock analyzer now has two spreadsheets based on Warren Buffett’s approach to stock valuation. The valuation sheets have been built from the ground up based on this article: Valuing Stocks the Warren Buffett Way The article mentions that more details can be found at: “Buffettology: The Previously Unexplained Techniques That Have Made Warren…
Continue reading →Use this Excel spreadsheet to analyze Indian stocks. I am trying to build a stock analyzer with which one can comprehensively analyze a stock, obtain fair value with different methods, obtain growth rates of different metrics and visualize them graphically. This is the first version of such an attempt. The sheet calculates ‘fair value’ of…
Continue reading →This is a sequel to the ‘step-by-step guide to long-term goal-based investing’ and is meant for those who have started investing for their long-term goals after, understanding how much to invest understanding how much to expect from each asset class used deciding on an asset allocation (how much in equity, how much in debt etc.) If…
Continue reading →Which is the single most important trait that characterizes a DIY (do it yourself) investor? 1) I for Individuality A person who rises above pigheadedness* and understands the steps necessary for wealth creation. However, once the basics are clear (asset allocation is all that is needed!), the person chooses a path defined by personal…
Continue reading →I am a movie buff. Here is a list of my favourite movies with a financial theme. This is an off-beat listing and is obviously non-exhaustive. When I ask myself to make a list, many wonderful movies escape my memory. This is all I could muster. All posters are from Wikipedia and all storylines and…
Continue reading →The primary stumbling block that prevents investors from achieving holistic fiscal health is mental clutter. Their minds are filled with the wrong questions. The right question is a prerequisite for finding the right answer. One such wrong question, and the flavour of the season is: Where should I invest to save tax? PPF or ELSS?…
Continue reading →Balaji Vaidyanath from Sundaram AMC where he works as a fund manager in its PMS wing spoke about, investment process and construction of an equity portfolio on 1st Nov. 2014, at the Chennai Investor Education Workshop on Financial Planning and Goal-based investing. The workshop was jointly organised by Srinivasan Sundararaman of MoneyKare, Wealth Managers, and myself and…
Continue reading →Are the markets overvalued? Is the Nifty PE too high? Should I exit and re-enter later? Aided by ‘experts’ who advice ‘caution’, such questions are doing the rounds again. Here are some misconceptions and myths about the Nifty PE. In a previous post on the relevance of the Nifty PE for the long-term investor, I…
Continue reading →There are some grey areas in personal finance and there are some downright dark areas. One such dark area is how a couple should prepare for parenting duties once a child is on the way. Dark, because there are several possibilities and each would impact the present and the future in several ways. Child birth…
Continue reading →An SWP or a systematic withdrawal plan is the lesser-known cousin of the SIP. In an SWP, an investor would receive a specific sum at periodic intervals (monthly, quarterly etc.) from a lump sum invested in a mutual fund. Here is an SWP calculator with a step-up option. Although I am not a fan of the…
Continue reading →Use this Excel-based template for creating an amortization schedule for your home loan. It allows you to visualize the monthly and yearly evolution of interest and principle components and the balance of the loan. It can accommodate regular (monthly, quarterly, bi-annual and annual) and irregular (random months) pre-payment schedules. It can also handle a loan…
Continue reading →Life insurance, health insurance, accident insurance and critical illness insurance are tailor-made fortification products that help a family tackle unpleasant and unexpected developments. Be it expenses due to hospitalization, or loss or decrease in income due to death, accident or a critical illness. I refer to them as fortification products because they protect the families…
Continue reading →Use this rolling standard deviation calculator to evaluate the volatility in returns of a mutual fund. This is an idea that struck me during the Chennai investor meet in response to a question. The sheet calculates the rolling return and rolling standard deviation for a specified interval. For equity funds, the rolling standard deviation of…
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