Firstly, it’s scary to look at the universe of all available mutual funds and then select the best funds for your goals. There are about 44 mutual fund houses offering more than 2500 schemes for us to invest our money. Is there a “sensible default” way to invest your money in equity mutual funds? Before…
While making investments, there are two factors which affect our decisions with respect to taking risks. It is important to understand our Willingness vs Ability to take risk. Ability to take risk – This measure tells us how much of risk can be taken by us while making an investment decision. Willingness to take risk –…
Let us look at different sections under which National Pension Scheme provides tax relief. Again, primary purpose of us investing in in this tool is NOT to save taxes. It is to invest for our retirement and increase our human capital beyond our working age. It is already a given that we all exhaust our…
Above two images give you a good overview of National Pension Scheme. If you do not want to read the entire blog, please spend time reading the above two images. Remember, the purpose of National Pension Scheme is not to save you more taxes – it is to provide for the cashflows after retirement. Saving…
You would have seen that most Mutual fund plan has direct plan and regular plan. And you also would have noted that there is a difference between the NAV of the direct and regular plan. Let me take an example of one of the funds – Nippon India Growth Fund and compare the NAV of…
I generally plan for goals which are further than 7 years from now. I am clear on the instruments I can invest – namely Mutual funds, Gold bond funds, Stocks, FD and RD – I generally use a combination of these tools to arrive at an investment plan. With these constraints how do I invest…
Insurances are bought much cheaper when bought early in our life, this is true for both Life Insurance and Health insurance. So catch them young 🙂 First thing is to enter into an insurance agreement with insurer early and continue the same at a much cheaper rate for life. The earlier you enter, the lesser the…
In the first part of the blog here, we looked at why Insurance is not an ideal investment. Let us look at this a bit more quantitatively now, to let the numbers do the talking. We will compare quantitatively the returns from the two scenarios below: “Invest” in LICs “New Endowment Plus” policy of 10L…
When you ask any 80s/90s kid, what are their investments – most of us will start by saying “I have a LIC Policy of 5L”! Try this out, will you :)? Say this with me insurance is not an investment! Let us look at the definitions of Insurance and Investment from wikipedia. Insurance – Insurance is a…
We talked about the advantages of automating investments and how “Analysis Paralysis” can be avoided by automating them. Not just investments, even predictable expenses should not cause us unnecessary shocks. And this is what I mean by “Automate your expenses”. It is actually “Automate the savings for your expenses” – but you would not read…
