It is frustrating to see individuals having difficulty in choosing insurance policies – be it life, health or accident insurance. Their minds are cluttered with so many product features (some necessary and others not so) that they keep delaying the purchase. Here is a step-by-step guide to purchasing a health insurance policy. I am no…
Continue reading →I discuss simple ways in which a mutual fund portfolio associated with a long-term goal can be reviewed. This is a grey area in personal finance and there is no optimal way to do this. Each individual must necessarily develop their own style of review. So multiple solutions are the norm here. This post is…
Continue reading →Closed-ended equity mutual fund NFO started cropping up frequently a little before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. They represent the efforts of AMC and distributors to lock-in AUM and therefore, profits regardless of market volatility. I had earlier written about why one should not invest in closed-ended mutual funds from a financial goal planning point of…
Continue reading →Assuming that we all agree that proper money management is vital to our financial well-being, a syllabus for financial literacy might help in evaluating not only our fiscal health, but also that of our friends, relatives and contacts (if they want such help!). Such a syllabus is surprisingly short when we have nothing to gain…
Continue reading →Every now and then readers have suggested that I write about the FMCG sector and in particular, FMCG funds. Since I know next to nothing about this, I requested Krishna Kishore who writes a refreshing blog on stock investing at tyroinvestor.com to discuss some of the myths surrounding FMCG stocks. This is his second post at…
Continue reading →Your online mutual fund investment platform is not free! Be it a bank or an online distributor, why on Earth would someone offer you a robust platform for transaction convenience and consolidation for free?! A little background before we dig in: It is raining Direct mutual fund portals! As people start discussing the fees these…
Continue reading →Have you ever wondered when and how a mutual fund declares a dividend? Or what is dividend stripping in mutual funds and shares? In this post, let us try to answer these questions with simple illustrations. Perhaps due to the complex accounting principles involved, the standard answer to this question is, “when it has a…
Continue reading →It is raining direct mutual fund investment portals! First MF Utility Online platforn went live. Then we heard of Invezta, Unovest (launching soon), BharosaClub(open) and ORO Wealth (went live last week). More are in the works!! Here are the details of ORO Wealth portal along a comparison of its features with MF Utility, Invezta and Bharosa…
Continue reading →If we invest in market-linked products like stocks, debt mutual funds, gold etc. it is a good idea to benchmark our returns with respect to the volatility associated with the instrument. This can be done with the an idea known as risk-adjusted returns. Unfortunately, this volatility is often referred to as ‘risk’. When we refer to…
Continue reading →A non-exhaustive list of mutual fund investing do’s, don’ts and myths. Updated Jan 25th 2016. Never buy mutual funds (or anything for that matter) from banks. They don’t care about us. All they care about is their commissions. So they will be happy to thrust just about any product (mutual fund, ULIPs, ….) down our throat…
Continue reading →May I request you to ask yourself when was the first time you encountered phrases like financial literacy, investor education, financial awareness etc.(If you have not, good for you!)? Then ask yourself who are the people who use these terms frequently and how many among them are product pushers? The product here being mutual funds,…
Continue reading →I am sick and tired of fluctuating equity returns. Why can’t I use recurring deposits and fixed deposits to build my retirement corpus? How would you answer such a question? I would say, Yes, you absolutely can do so! To make my point clearer, let us run through a specific retirement corpus calculation. A more…
Continue reading →Are we now in a bear market? The Senex has fallen 8% this month and 14% the last year. If you had invested a lump sum at the end of May 2014, it would given close to nothing or even a small loss. Does this mean we are in a bear market now? This is…
Continue reading →Download a free early retirement calculator for India with a checklist to retire early in India. You can also down a free e-book to plan early retirement. When I earlier asked “Is it possible to retire early in India?“, many readers assumed that I meant early retirement is not possible in India. All I wanted to…
Continue reading →This is a guest post by one of the earliest freefincal readers, Anish Mohan. In 2001, Anish, a profound believer in Swami Vivekananda abandoned his romance for communism and took up a job in the Indian software industry, where he witnessed the good days of post-liberalisation era, punctuated with events of the 2008 global crash. In…
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