Posts tagged with "financial-planning"


  • How Debt Fund Taxation Affects My Planning

    Debt funds are taxed differently after changes to the Finance Bill 2023. This is old news I know, but I did not plan on writing anything about it because it does not change anything in my financial plan. But a reader asked my opinion and I thought I will do a quick post. Remember that anything that I write in my blog is not financial advice for people at large. It is just a recount of my experience and how various investment opportunities or taxes are applicable to my specific situation. Even if some one is exactly in my situation, my advice or experience may not apply to them because it also has to do with the mindset. So unless you are in my exact situation both financially and mentally, most of what I write may not even be relevant to you.

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  • Review Of A Reader's Retirement Portfolio

    Every once in a while I receive emails from some of my readers asking for advice on financial planning or unschooling or other things. I have posted a couple (A Reader’s Dilemma, Should I Retire Early?) of emails along with my replies in this blog. Today I wanted to post one more such conversation I had with another reader. As usual, I took permission from the person. Most of the conversation is published as is and I tried to make minimal edits. Hope you might learn something from it or perhaps have better advice. Feel free to comment at the end of this post if you want to post your advice. Lets get started.

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  • Personal Finance Is Not Always About Money

    We attribute personal finance to so much about financial planning, but it is really not just about the money. There are various other aspects which don’t feel like they are related to personal finance, but they are. Take for example the quality of life aspect. It is not related to money, but it could be part of personal finance for some. How? Let’s take this example – say I was offered a job with Rs. 20L per year where the work does not involve any travel, and say I have another offer which pays be Rs. 30L per year but with lots of travel. I would choose the former offer. Because the quality of life would be far better without travel. I don’t care for the extra Rs. 10L per year if it is going to take me away from family for prolonged periods.

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  • Financial Independence Trend

    There has been a sharp rise in the F.I.R.E. trend in the recent past. For those who don’t know, F.I.R.E stands for financial independence and retire early. It is the new fad in town which I am also part of :). In the past, people searching for financial independence used to trend around 20 queries a day on Google search. It has more than tripled if you look at the data from the last one year. I wonder why so many are looking for financial independence. Perhaps COVID-19 and the resulting work from home culture are to blame. Or may be the sudden rise in wealth because of the recent stock market bull run is the cause. I have no idea, but people seem to be more interested in F.I.R.E in the recent past more than before. Or at least that is what Google trends is indicating.

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  • Financial Planning Workshop

    I have recently done something that I haven’t done in the longest time – teach someone :). The last I remember teaching was way back in college and before that in 11th standard. And each time I had to teach an audience, it was because someone put me in the spot and not because of my own interest. In 11th is was because I was not paying attention to the class and when asked why I was not paying attention, I would give rude answers like “I already know it, I don’t want to listen”. I was sort of a rebel and generally a difficult student to teach. I guess may be the teachers wanted to show me how difficult it was to teach and asked me to solve some problems on the board and explain it to the class.

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  • Be Smart Or Not Be Stupid?

    It is amazing how many people focus on being smart than avoiding stupidity. One could be the smartest person in town, but if they keeping making silly mistakes, eventually the mistakes pile up enough to waste a smart decision. This is even more true in investing. I am one of those people trying to be smart instead of avoiding mistakes. This reminds me of an article I read a long time ago about the findings of a scientist and statistician Simon Ramo.

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