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 →I have always been cynical of new-year resolutions. The way I see it, a man who waits until the dawn of the new year to bring about a positive change in his life is unlikely to follow through with his resolutions. While I continue to hold that sentiment, I have decided with immediate effect to…
Continue reading →Each December, I conduct a personal financial audit. That is, I take stock of , financial goals what is the value of my investments for each goal. What is their worth? have I invested what I resolved to invest last December? Will I have enough to invest for all my goals in the year ahead? Review calculations…
Continue reading →Use this real returns calculator to check how effective a financial instruments is in protecting the purchasing power of a lumpsum from inflation. The reserve bank of India has announced the issue of inflation linked bonds in which a lumpsum invested for 10 years will receive an interest equal to 1.5% + ‘change’ in the…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Many investors would like to park their lump sum in tax-free bonds, and invest the interest paid out each year in mutual funds, stocks or PPF. What if the lump sum was invested in a mutual fund/stocks instead of these bonds? Which option would fetch the investor more returns? Here is a calculator to evaluate…
Continue reading →Do not invest in tax free bonds if your retirement is a long way off. Even if are retiring soon, do not invest in these unless you have thoroughly evaluated your options. There, I said it. That is the message of this post. I have been wanting to say that for a long time. Ever…
Continue reading →The importance of a solid retirement plan cannot be stressed enough. The importance of ‘stress testing’ a retirement plan also cannot be stressed enough! Here is an Excel Monte Carlo Retirement Calculator that allows you to do just that! If you wish to plan for your retirement, recognise its importance: The cost of postponing your…
Continue reading →Regular readers of freefincal would recognize that the blog now has a decent set of resources for mutual fund evaluation and analysis. I would like to encourage the use of these tools and calculators by publishing analysis of a few mutual funds from time to time. The aim is to make it clear that mutual…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Financial goals maybe arranged into three categories. (a) Goals based on a one-time expense. Classic example is a marriage. You invest to create a corpus, which evaporates around the time of the wedding. Any event that is unlikely to occur again or occurs infrequently would fall in this category. For example, a child’s under-graduate and…
Continue reading →How different is a large cap equity mutual fund from an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks an equity index? The portfolio of an index ETF is likely to be nearly identical to that of the index at any point of time. Typically the portfolio of all large cap mutual funds will have a good amount of…
Continue reading →On occasions like Dhanteras and Akshaya Tritiya, AMCs and fund distributors advice you to start gold ETFs for financials goals like a child’s marriage. For some reason, many around us seem to think that one must start investing in gold-ETFs because gold is needed for our children’s (typically daughters!) marriage. As a result, many end…
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