Who pays the highest amount of tax in the country? Mr. Ambani? or Mr. Narayanamurthy? Well neither. Let us see the life history of a typical government or a bank employee. They join for service after a competitive exam – after that they are happy to hold on to that job for life. They earn [...]
A friend asked me to see value research online – and see the lead story on why you should distrust your adviser. I was amused because ‘How to select a financial adviser’ is a topic with which I have often grappled for and on behalf of many friends. Let us take a typical ‘media’ answer [...]
Prior to World War II most people in the world were happy living in rented houses. This gave rise to concepts like ‘pagdi’ where you paid a sizeable deposit and a small rent. Mumbai used to be full of such properties . In fact this gave rise to sayings like ‘Fools build (buy?) houses, Wise [...]
Inflation story continued……… Psychological Impact of inflation is quite harsh on the investors and savers. Economic theory says when inflation is high, people will tend to spend more – because there is no incentive to save. This is true to a very limited extent. Most people get so scared that they start saving more and [...]
It is customary for people to give sane advice- if you have a kid, the kid should have a PPF account. This advice makes very little sense. First of all most of the people I meet today invest far, far more in a year than the max possible amount of Rs. 70,000 in a PPF [...]
Most financial planners and personal portfolio managers are questioning their basic assumption of asset allocation. In the year 2008 asset allocation failed. This of course is their conclusion based on a set of data. Data is accurate but the conclusion seems to be a little flawed. In the years from 2002 to 2007 (when Mr. [...]