The following is an account of an ordeal to redeem from mutual funds in demat form. As mentioned several times earlier, holding mutual funds (except ETFs) in demat form makes no sense. Mutual fund units are already in electronic form! Unless an investor wants to (or rather tries to) sell closed-ended mutual funds before maturity,…
Continue reading →After the debt mutual fund taxation change from 1st April 2023, many readers have asked us if they can use NPS Tier 2 as an alternative—a discussion. We had previously discussed a related idea: Can I use NPS Tier II as a low-cost index fund? All NPS pension fund managers provide portfolio details under “statutory disclosures”…
Continue reading →The latest freefincal Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener is now available. Use it to screen for consistently performing equity mutual funds. You can screen based on fund category & benchmark and spot mutual funds with a higher return than a benchmark at a lower risk. Inside, you get discounted links to our robo advisory tool…
Continue reading →A reader asks, “Sir, What return should I use while planning for retirement? I wish to retire by age 55. I am currently 35 years of age”. Many people make two mistakes while planning their finances. The first common mistake is presuming that equity mutual funds provide a 12% (or more!) return and utilizing that…
Continue reading →I purchased two endowment policies last year and currently pay an annual premium of 2 Lakhs for these policies. Renewal for these policies is due next month, and I’ve heard that insurance policies are not ideal for investment due to their relatively low returns. So, should I consider surrendering these policies? About the author: Ajay…
Continue reading →We received this interesting question.”First of all, I’d like to thank you for the blogs and videos that you make. I’m fresh out of college(21 years old) and will start my first job soon. Your content has spiked my interest in personal finance and made me examine it analytically”. “My question is rather simple but…
Continue reading →We publish a list of stocks with low volatility and momentum each month. We provide data for BSE 500 and BSE 100 stocks. There are now three different screener files available. (1) Stocks with low volatility and momentum from the BSE 100 large cap universe are available as a separate file (2) Stocks with low…
Continue reading →A reader asks, “I have a question regarding this article, wrt to the kid’s education corpus – After ten years of MF investing, Suhas is on track to achieve his financial goals. The user mentions opening a second ppf account. My question is, Is it possible for me to invest in my kid’s ppf account,…
Continue reading →This article explains how a retirement bucket strategy can be combined with an income ladder in various ways. The goal is to reduce the management risks associated with a bucket strategy. In an income ladder, we use fixed-income instruments that mature periodically in future, providing income to the retiree. Let us consider an example. Suppose…
Continue reading →We recently ran a survey for clients of fee-only advisors who are part of Freefincal’s curated list and fee-only India – 964 clients have participated. A healthy trend has emerged that warrants our attention, and we strongly believe any further response would only strengthen it. We shall discuss answers to two survey questions in this…
Continue reading →This article addresses frequently asked questions on Financial Independence, Retire Early or FIRE. 1 What is the definition of financial independence? When a person has enough income from her investments or net worth to not only replace existing gainful employment but also combat inflation in essential expenses and lifestyle changes for the remainder of their…
Continue reading →This article compares my stock portfolio with an equivalent investment in a Nifty index fund and the Nifty 100 Low Volatility 30 TR index. We post this comparison each month. Before we begin, new readers need to appreciate the context of these investments. I started direct equity investing only after achieving a comfortable level of…
Continue reading →As reported earlier, SEBI has included nine freefincal calculators created by M. Pattabiraman in its investor education website. Ms Monika Halan, the SEBI Investor Protection Education Fund Advisory Committee chairperson, suggested including these tools, and the committee inaugurated them on 22nd Nov 2022. Tutorials for each tool will be made available in the coming weeks….
Continue reading →A reader inquires, “As I approach my 50th birthday this year, I’m contemplating retirement. What steps should I take to determine the necessary retirement corpus for 2023? My yearly expenses amount to approximately Rs. 6.5 lakhs.” As mentioned in a recent article – I thought a pension was unnecessary, but age taught me a retirement planning…
Continue reading →At freefincal, we have often used the Sensex price returns to portray risk via rolling lump sum and SIP returns. We have added 2% to the price return to account for dividends. This is because the price data starts from 1970 while the total returns data (that assumes dividends are reinvested without tax begins only…
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