Tag: personal finance

Consider that you are working in a multi-storeyed sophisticated building. Chances are high that you were taught by the fire squad team there, how to escape in case of fire. If you had ever attended that drill you will know that at the time of fire and asked to exit, you have to simply get up and start moving towards the exit (staircase) without any other thought. No saving your files, no shutting off your computer. No searching for valuables.Now consider that as you are reading this a fire breaks out. Will any of you stop and try to figure …

Thanks to Srini. Your comment got me in mood again to write on Personal Finance after quite some time. ‘Hope for the best’ – we all do it, almost without any effort. When we buy a stock, we expect it to sky rocket out of everybody’s expectation. When we plan to get a car we expect the prices to fall down and freebies added by the sellers. No one needs to tell us that. We will always hope for the very best to happen to us whatever be the case. There is nothing wrong with that attitude, after all positive …

Stop the Losses (When to Sell – Part 1) In lesson 3 we just learnt that the most important thing to do in investing in Stock Market is to take care of the losses. Make sure your losses are minimum and how do we do that. One technique that we learned was not to make big bets. The rule that you are going to learn is the most important and should be adhered with a lot of discipline. Let us take the same example of the previous lesson. You got 1 lakh to invest in stocks and 5% of that …

Please go through Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 before reading this. Why would you want to know all about the Stock market? Why the hell are people desperate to understand its functioning. There is just one answer “To make money”. You and I are here to get some profit from it. If anyone wants to know the market, because he thinks it is fun, Goodbye to him. You are better served at the Casino. Stock market and trading are serious business. They are not joke or fun or something like riding a roller coaster. We are putting our hard earned …

As we saw in Lesson No. 1, shares that are initially launched as IPOs eventually find their way to the secondary market (the BSE or the NSE). It is like an auction place for the shares, those who have the shares tell an ‘ask’ price at which they will sell the share and those who want it will have a ‘bid’ price at which they would like to buy the share. If you had happened to see some news clips, you can find the BSE something like a local fish market with everyone yelling and running around. Why can’t they …

hat better time to talk of shares than now with the Sensex hitting all time high and the bulls are having fun at the Dalal Street.This is how most of the articles begin when they want to educate people on stocks and shares and eventually those who came to read will feel that it is not for them and flee from the place. So I thought I would do it a bit different and see if that helps. If you are one who had always wanted to know what stock market is and what they sell there or if you …

As of this writing India is populated with 1533701675 individuals. Though India is quite a big country, the surging population will render the real estate costs on the higher side year after year. One often hears that a plot (site) purchased a few years back for say 65000 is now selling at 2.5 Lakhs and so on. In most cases property appreciation is in the order of 40-100%. That is enormous considering the fact that the very risky stock markets also cannot give such returns on a regular basis. The risk involved is very less as a carefully chosen property …

Gold is not new to us. Come marriage and there is the shameless talk of gold for dowry. We still have some auspicious day to buy gold. The shining yellow metal has attracted humans (especially indians) a lot and there are good reasons for that. Gold has always been equated to the status symbol. It does not get rusted or for that matter loses its shine. It is extremely ductile and can be easily converted to another form (jewellery). Well we can go on like this and a chemist can give much more information like its symbol (Au) and what …

We saw in the last lesson how ELSS can bring energetic returns. But we must keep in mind that Diversification is still the key. Also there are many out there who are apprehensive of investing in a Mutual Fund, especially the ones tied to Stock Market. What else? We cannot just pump in more money into LIC policies as we know how detrimental it can be. If you are ready to forgo liquidity you get another excellent investment vehicle – The Public Provident Fund, a Govt backed scheme. Please note that PPF is different from PF. To open a PPF …

If you have come this far, I take it for granted that you are now aware of the basics and raring to go further. At this point, you must realize that you as a person are unique and there may be 1001 reasons why one investment vehicle won’t give you a pleasant ride, while the same may be the best for someone else. But there are a few well tested vehicles that I will review from now on. Still the decision is yours. A Mutual Fund, as the name suggests, is a trust where many people put in money and …