A chronic illness is a condition that cannot be cured, but can be ‘managed’ with periodic monitoring and medicines. “What is the cost of managing such an illness for life?” Subra suggested that I make a calculator to answer this question. It is well known that chronic illnesses are on the increase. Every third or…
Continue reading →As a student of market volatility, my eyes popped out in interest to learn that we have index that gives an idea about market volatility – the India Vix. India VIX is a measure of how volatile the market is expected to be over the next 30 days. Its calculation is described here in extraordinary…
Continue reading →Ever since I revealed that I invest for my son’s marriage in the year-end personal financial audit, several friends, and readers have chided me about this: ‘Why do you want to invest for your kids marriage?’ ‘Our kids should fund their own marriage’ ‘Weddings should be simple affairs devoid of all lavishness’ Journalist Sunderajan Padmanabhan…
Continue reading →At some point or another mutual fund or stock investors would have encountered the acronym, CAGR – Compounded Annual Growth rate. I would like to discuss what this stands for, its limitations and how to use it to interpret mutual fund or portfolio performance in a series of posts. Imagine a fixed deposit that is…
Continue reading →What is the worst that can happen to us from a financial standpoint? Life insurance will take care of our family upon our death provided, it is adequate and kept in force – check your cover here. Health insurance will take of a family member’s hospitalization provided, it is enhanced often enough to keep pace…
Continue reading →If I were to redeem an amount today from your mutual fund holding, What would be the short term capital gain? What would be the long term capital gain? What is the tax corresponding to these gains? what amount is free to be redeemed from an ELSS fund? How would I lose due to exit load? Here…
Continue reading →With an aim to encourage readers to analyse and evaluate mutual fund performance on their own, using my excel files when possible ;), I would like to post the analysis of a fund from time to time. In the past, I have covered HDFC Top 200 twice: Step by step analysis guide Rolling returns analysis…
Continue reading →Regular readers may recall that I described my experience with cashless mediclaim when I underwent a thymectomy last march. A couple of Wednesdays ago my mother fell and broke her femur bone. While mine was a planned hospitalization, this was an emergency hospitalization. I am no stranger to emergency hospitalizations (unfortunately). This is the 5th…
Continue reading →While investing periodically for long-term goals, an investor should be aware of two factors: The power of compounding oh-hum, boring! I am sure most people reading this are tired of see how a small investment grows to an unimaginably large value … after several decades! Volatility Most of us must invest in volatile instruments like…
Continue reading →I understand the need for life insuranceand I understand that it is best to buy a term life insurance policy. However, how much should I be insured for? When should I buy such policies? How many policies should I buy? I am sure you would agree that these are common enough questions … among those…
Continue reading →Last week I wrote about an inflation protected income can be generated by dividing a corpus into 4/5 portions and investing each into financial instruments of varying risk and tenure, while setting up an income ladder for the first few years. As the investment in each bucket matures a new income ladder will be set up…
Continue reading →Recently I had posted an analysis of Franklin Indian Blue Chip fund (FIBCF). In response, Swapnil suggested that I compare the fund with Sensex or Nifty including dividends. In the same post, I was able to include a comparison with the Nifty total returns index, as the data is conveniently available (as Swapnil pointed out)….
Continue reading →Retirement planning is the single most important financial goal common to every individual. It is the only financial goal in which a corpus would get spent over the course of decades! Retirement planning is simply non-negotiable. The cost of postponing systematic retirement planning is more dangerous than inflation. Regular readers would be aware of that…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →