Your Savings Guide

  The world is passing through a nightmare. Since last year the pandemic has cast a dark shadow over us. Every day we wake up to hear the news of death of the loved ones. At this time Doctors are advising to eat well and keep our immunity strong. Not only is the pandemic taking a toll on our health, but also it is crippling us financially. Job losses, huge hospital bills, medicine cost, price hike of the essential goods, seems like the list does not end. Just like our health, it is also time to think about our financial immunity. There are several important medicines I am going to discuss. Build an Emergency Fund. Don’t live paycheck to paycheck or invest all of your savings into illiquid funds or at the hour of crisis you will not have a penny to save yourself. One should keep aside every month some of his/her monthly income as an emergency fund. It can be kept in the form of RD, FD or in a separate savings account, which he/she will not touch until the hour of crisis like J...

  We all have dreams. We dream to become financially independent one day and to retire with a big corpus. Little we may save but so be it. We invest in various schemes and sleep peacefully at night thinking that our piggy bank will turn into kuber's wealth one day. But what if there is a silent monster out there who is slowly killing our dreams and turning it into a nightmare? Yes I'm not kidding. There is truly a monster out there and its name is Inflation. In layman's language inflation means price hike or reduction in purchasing power. Do you remember the ice cream you bought at Rupees five in your childhood? Today it is worth ten  rupees. The same ice cream. This is inflation or hike of price of the ice cream. That same thing but now you have to spend more to buy it. The silent monster is slowly killing your purchasing power. But can we spare this monster? What we should do to beat it? For that first, we need to understand it more clearly. Inflafion denotes a rise ...

''21 din mein Paisa Double!" We all know this famous movie dialogue. The word double lures every investor. Most people when start investing all they want is to quickly double their money and many financial institutions take advantage of this. What happens is you become a victim of misselling, invest in wrong schemes and lose your hard-earned money. So why believe in someone else's words when there is a simple trick to know how much time it will require to double your money. In the world of finance, it is known as The Rule of 72. If you are thinking of investing in a particular scheme first know how much interest the scheme is offering. Then divide the number 72 by that interest rate. You will get the required years by which that scheme will double your money. You will be astonished to see that none of the traditional schemes available in the market right now have the capability to double your money in the short term.  Only traditional scheme Kisan Vikash Patra...

What if in the near future you have huge debt and your creditors sue you? Or you have a marital dispute and your spouse claims alimony at the court! If you have a shortage of money the court can order to sell your movable or immovable property to honor the claim.  Nightmare isn't it?! You are probably thinking about whether you should dig a hole beneath your house to hide some of your hard-earned money. Relax. There is a better way. What I am talking about is Public Provident Fund or commonly known as PPF which apart from the Sovereign Guarantee provided by the Government of India also enjoys absolute immunity against any court orders. It means even if you have to sell everything else to save yourself the court can't touch a single penny that you deposited in it over the years. So what exactly is PPF? It's an Account meant for long-term savings where you can deposit up to Rs. 1.5 Lakh every year and will get the entire corpus back at maturity of 15 years with interest.  Wha...

You may have thought at least for once that my company provides me Medical Insurance. Why opt for it separately? What a waste of money! But what you are missing out is the great tax benefit the medical insurance provides. Mostly if you are in 20% or 30% income tax bracket the 80C tax benefit may look like a drop of water in front of the ocean. Here comes the Section 80D bundled with Medical Insurance that can provide upto 1 lakh income tax benefit apart from 1.5 Lakh of 80C, depending on the insurance premium paid per year. Let me explain how. There are Four scenarios. Scenario 1 . You take a policy for youself only or for you and your  spouse and children. You will get tax benefit upto Rs 25000. Scenario 2 . If you add your parents in the policy who are less than 60 years old with you only or along with your spouse and children, you will get tax benefit upto (25000+25000)=Rs. 50000 Scenario 3 . Just like scenario 2 but if your parents are above 60 years old, you will get ...

On February 1, like every year the finance minister has declared the budget and the great middle class was waiting for what goes in their favour! But Alas! May be there are  tax relief for the people over 75 years of age, the decision to put tax on interest income of VPF over contribution of 2.5 lakhs have put them in worries. Most of the salaried middle class loves the extra deduction over their mandatory EPF deduction which goes to the Voluntary Provident Fund and gives them a assured return of 8 to 8.5% which is much higher than traditional fds or PPF. Till now they were sleeping peacefully at night while having the idea of retiring with a great corpus at the age of 60. But this taxation is going to dig a hole in that dream. So what is the solution? The Solution is NPS. National Pension System. A Pension Plan managed by the PFRDA, the same organization that manages your PF. Just like VPF you can put whatever amount  you like in NPS and you will get a return of 9-10% on aver...