The 100 minus age rule is one of the oldest and most widely cited rules of thumb in personal finance. At 30, put 70% of your portfolio in equity. At 50, put 50% in equity. As you age, reduce equity and increase the stable, income-generating portion of your portfolio. Simple, memorable, and, for most people, […]
The emergency fund is the part of personal finance that sounds boring and probably saves you more money than any investment you’ll ever make. Without it, every market crash, every job loss, every unexpected medical bill becomes a forced sale of your best assets at the worst possible time. With it, these events are inconveniences […]
If you could make one investment decision and leave it alone for 15–20 years, a Nifty 50 ETF would be hard to beat. It owns India’s 50 largest companies. It costs under 0.1% per year to hold. It requires no stock picking, no fund manager, no annual review of scheme performance. You buy it, you […]
Gold is the one asset most Indian families already own, just in the wrong form, for the wrong reasons, and in proportions that were never really decided. A household buys jewellery for a wedding, inherits some from parents, accumulates more over decades, and one day realizes a substantial part of the family’s wealth is in […]
I grew up in a stockbroking family. My father was a broker. I have spent time around markets and market participants since I was a teenager. And I spent years making most of the mistakes that retail traders make, taking concentrated positions in single stocks, selling too early and watching the price continue rising, holding […]
The most common reason people don’t start investing is not lack of money. It’s the feeling that they don’t know enough yet. They want to understand everything before they begin, and because the financial world keeps offering more to learn, they never reach the point where they feel ready. Years pass. The best time to […]
The savings account is where most Indian families keep their money, and it is the worst place to keep money you don’t need immediately. Not because savings accounts are unsafe, they’re not, but because the 3–4% interest they pay is almost always below the inflation rate, which means the real purchasing power of that money […]