• Franklin To Disburse Our Investment?

    You probably remember the Franklin fiasco that happened some 9 months ago. All those who invested in the six wound up funds have their investments stuck for the past 9 months. While the funds were wound up they were still receiving interest income from the papers that it holds. Some papers matured while some others pre-paid the bonds. So overall Franklin has Rs. 14,391 Cr in income so far according to it's latest report on Jan 29, 2021. Of this amount 4,621 Cr was used up to pay back its borrowings. The left over Rs. 9,770 Cr is available for disbursement. However it was unable to return the monies because of a court case in Supreme Court.

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  • Budget 2021 And How It Affects Me

    Like last year, here is a quick overview of how the 2021 budget affects me. This is not an analysis or highlights of the budget. I am sure you can find many articles on those topics. This post is more specifically on how the budget affects my financial planning. To tell you the truth, there is nothing in the budget for me and that is a good thing! No news is good news isn't it?

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  • Dilemma Of An Upper Middle Class Parent

    One of the things that I observed is that as kids move from middle class to upper middle class, the fire and hunger to achieve comes down. Kids in lower or middle class families have a thirst to learn and achieve that slowly mellows down as the lifestyle improves. Some how I feel they become more complacent.

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  • Learnings From 2020

    The year 2020 has been special in many ways. We have seen something that was unprecedented not only in my life, but even during my parents life. Who would have ever imagined a lock-down of the whole nation for example? Many things were a first in 2020. While the year was not too bad, I did have a few learnings. In this last post (hopefully) in the year review series, I want to go over my learnings. Pretty much all my issues and the resulting lessons were related to Franklin :).

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Plans That Failed

    From what you have seen so far in my year in review series, you might think 2020 was not too bad. It seems like most of the things worked out fine for me except for that loss of electronics and Franklin fiasco. But that is not really true. We made a few other plans that just did not go well at all. Here is a review of those disappointments.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Investments and Redemptions

    In the past few posts, I have written about my expenses, investment returns and net worth. In this post I want to show you my investment pattern over the last year. I will try to explain my weird investment behavior. A word of caution though. Do not copy my investment style. It will most likely do you more harm than good. The reason is quite simple. I am a retired person with no income. If I had a salary I would certainly invest differently (read more equity investments). I will most certainly do my monthly investments and not the random investments as you will soon see.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Net Worth

    Continuing on with the year in review series, next up is net worth. This year I wanted to make a small change to my net worth calculations. For the last 2 years I have included my US stocks (employee stocks) as part of my net worth. That has caused a lot of confusion to my readers. While my company stocks in the US are worth something, I am planning to keep it out of the reviews. That corpus is supposed to be used for my international (mostly US) vacation. So no point dragging it into net worth calculations.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Daughter's Portfolio

    You know that I am managing a small corpus for my daughter. Since there is no goal involved and it is an experiment, I decided to go all in with equity investments. The plan is to hand over the portfolio to my daughter when she become a major. This will be a nice experiment to check if my quest for low volatility portfolio coupled with market timing is any better than just blindly investing in equities. All I am really interested is in the returns as compared with my portfolio.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Expenses

    This is the continuation of my 2020 year in review series. See my previous post if you missed my returns report. As you probably already know, I maintain two set of expenses — one for monthly expenses and another for annual expenses. The monthly expenses include expenses that occur more frequently than once a year and the rest of the expenses go into annual expenses. Lets dive deeper into the report.

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  • Year In Review – 2020 Returns

    At the start of every new year I review my portfolio and take stock of my expenses, returns and net-worth. So just like last year I am reviewing my returns for 2020. This is the first of the year in review series. I will also post my expenses and net-worth reviews in upcoming posts. Without wasting too much time, lets get right to it.

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