In our office we have a big team which works on a personal finance software – which failed and has been scrapped (update on 10th July, 2018) So the kids in that team keep asking what is financial freedom? My answer is simple, and here it is: 1. Largely, if you can laugh a lot […]

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Many people think they (and the industry tells them) that they are eligible for a “home loan”, car loan, personal loan, credit card loan etc. Actually this is not true. You only get a loan against your Form 16, which means this is a loan against your future earning capacity. Imagine telling a lender that […]

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What events trigger a market to rise and what triggers a fall? Conventional wisdom tells us “good events” should trigger a rise and “bad” events should trigger a fall. Correct? No. Wrong. The basic assumption that you can isolate “one” event to the day (or month)’s market performance is a media myth – necessary to […]

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Mutual fund ranking is another media creation. Media needs to create stories daily. So it helps to have quarterly results. If you have 200 companies 4 quarterly results and 200 final results ensure that 1000 stories are ready. Similarly, if you 250 schemes and you have monthly rankings (thank God it is only monthly and […]

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A Very good Poker joke is “Look around the table. If you are not able to find who is to be had that evening, it is you”. Similarly when you are with a professional and you do not bother to find out how he is compensated, frankly, I do not think it is the advisor’s […]

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When my uncle called me in the morning and asked me a simple question, it set me thinking, talking, smsing “Is the increasing yield in FMP coming from increased risk” i.e. is the quality of assets falling. And this small note was born. The retail investor, tired of falling equity markets was (is?) looking for […]

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Financial planners, mutual fund sellers, bank RMs, all of them have a knack of racking up a large number when it comes to your retirement corpus! Normally they do this so that they can galvanize the client to act. However, from what I have seen it normally has a negative effect! When people look at […]

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