Are you worried the high expense ratios of active mutual funds? Are you looking for an index fund that has performed reasonably well with low expenses? Then you can consider a Nifty Next 50 index fund instead of active funds in the multi-cap category. Why? As pointed out in a series of posts on the Nifty Strategy…
Continue reading →I see more and more young earners trying to manage the retirement corpus of their parents. In a way, this is healthy and in a way dangerous. Let us face it. Most retirement corpuses are not healthy enough. In the sense that one cannot wield them to generate an inflation-protected post-retirement income. This is especially…
Continue reading →“If I have a lump sum, what is the best way to invest it in an equity mutual fund?”, is a question that I am asked repeatedly. In this post, let us discuss simple ways to invest a lump sum in an equity mutual fund. Lump sum in a debt mutual fund Let us first get…
Continue reading →Have you ever wondered how the total expense ratio (TER) of a mutual fund is calculated? Or what the constituents of the TER are? The most authentic publically available source for understanding the TER is the annual report released by AMC. Yesterday, Franklin Templeton announced to its investors that the abridged annual report for 2015-2016…
Continue reading →This post showcases a presentation by Aparna C K to her office colleagues. I am delighted that she kindly consented to let me share this here. Regular readers may be aware that Aparna has written two guest posts for freefincal which became instant hits: Guide to efile Income Tax Return For AY 2014-15 Guide to efile Income Tax Return:…
Continue reading →Here is a guide to investing in the National Pension System (NPS) with suggestions for existing and potential individual, corporate and government subscribers. Over the past few years, the government has tried hard to make the National Pension System popular. First, it used the magic phrase tax-saving by allowing an additional 50,000 invested in Tier 1 to be discounted from…
Continue reading →In India, not everyone can offer investment advice. They will first have to be registered as an investment adviser (RIA) with SEBI. Once registered they have the obligation to act as a fiduciary. Meaning they will have to put the client first at all time. Or in other words, prescribe only commission free products. Whether…
Continue reading →Diversification refers to the simple common sense, ‘not to rely too much on one entity’. In this post, I discuss simple ways to build a diversified portfolio using mutual funds. The main purpose of diversification is to minimise losses, or rather the volatility in the portfolio value. This implies reducing exposure to an asset class…
Continue reading →Equity savings funds are the latest type of asset allocation mutual funds introduced first in late 2014 when the government made the duration for debt mutual fund capital gains to be classified as ‘long-term’ from 1-year to 3-years. Equity savings funds are basically arbitrage+equity+ debt funds. They would hold a minimum of 65% equity (most…
Continue reading →A little over two years ago, an automated mutual fund & financial goal tracker was released. It was made with extensive beta testing by readers and is reasonably popular despite the availability of user-friendly online trackers. Update: This file does not work anymore since the historical NAV download from AMFI has been discontinued. I am working on a…
Continue reading →Financial freedom seeker and early retiree, Balaji Swaminathan shares his experience in an extraordinarily forthright interview. Balaji retired in his 40s in India after having achieved financial independence. He explains how he planned his investments and when and how he decided that he was ready to retire. Ever since I wrote a post on ‘Is…
Continue reading →A method to choose debt mutual funds with no credit rating risk and low volatility or interest rate risk from a category known as short-term gilt funds – is discussed. This is post is a follow up to Debt Mutual Fund Investments: Minimizing Risk which referenced the fall in NAV of several Franklin Funds due to…
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 →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 →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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