FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early This long article describes a calculator that combines a set of factors to assess the feasibility of achieving financial freedom early in life. Financial Freedom (FF), or Financial Independence(FI) can be defined this way – the state of having sufficient personal wealth to live, without having to work actively
Wait, NPS still has issues as a retirement asset
The recent announcements on improvements in the New Pension Scheme (NPS see here) have created a lot of buzz around the scheme. The most impact is seemingly from the new ‘Exempt-Exempt-Exempt’ (EEE) nature of NPS. In this post we see why NPS is still not a good enough choice for most people as a retirement
Dialing back on mutual fund dividends – A Welcome Development
Mutual fund dividends have been used in interesting ways in India. It is public knowledge that the dividends in mutual funds are not the same as dividends from stocks. Unlike dividends from stocks, mutual fund dividends are paid out from the fund corpus itself – any dividend then decreases the Net Asset Value of the
Overnight Funds – A good choice for safety
Debt mutual funds are promoted as products that give ‘better returns’ than fixed deposits, while being quite safe. This is of course not true. Debt funds carry more risks than bank deposits. Another popular misconception is around one category of debt funds – Liquid funds. They are almost universally (mis)regarded as a direct alternative to
Jeevan Anand – Joy for the agent, not for the buyer
Endowment plans are evergreen products for the insurance industry. They receive a lot of promotion and aggressive selling. In this article, we compare this investment linked product with a separate investment product and show that it helps to not mix insurance and investment.
Pollack’s Index Card: All the financial advice that you ever need – India version
Index Card for India The original Index Card for personal finance was published by Harold Pollack here: Index Card It became quite popular and the author co-wrote a book on it. In a great episode on Freakanmoics Radio, Pollack listed the rules this way. The transcript can be found here (Search for Pollack if you