Expense Account, Mint One of the nicest calls I answered on my weekly TV show recently was from a 20-something kid from the US who wanted to plan out her parent’s finances. Mum had retired, dad was going to soon and daughter wanted the best advice for her parents on cracking their retirement nest egg....
Expense Account, Mint In the days when TV dinners took on a new meaning, when the stories about alleged wrongdoing in the preparations for the Commonwealth Games (CWG) became the meal itself at dinner time in homes across the country, I heard this story. One of the scam accused walks into a swish south Delhi...
Expense Account, Mint The news gets worse every day. Food inflation is in double digits and the base effect argument is now wearing thin. The forecast for prices does not look good, never mind what the periodic calming statements by those in the government say. Interest rates are rising and another rate hike is imminent....
Expense Account, Mint Two things happened in the last week that seem not to be connected but should be. The Citibank fraud bubbled up through the mud and more quietly the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) had its first meeting. The first is a tiny example of what is wrong with the banking sector...
Expense Account, Mint We like to deal with money as a block and are loath to break it up into smaller bits that will do different things. The same pot of money can do a variety of things if put in different products, but we would rather take a neat decision of swinging the whole...
Expense Account, Mint My teenager is sick of me. Nothing new in the history of teenage issues with parents, but she has a unique problem. It is not the usual teenage gripe about how-dumb-can-you-be or the will-you-just-get-off-my-case grunt or even how-did-you-get-so-far-with-so-little-brain eye roll. No. It’s a totally new one that will put books on managing...
Expense Account, Mint Introduced to Westerns some 15 years ago, they are now my best de-stress read. Among them the stack of Louis L’Amour books takes up an entire bookshelf. While at one level the books are about guns and fights, read as a series, it is one giant story of the settlement of a...
Expense Account, Mint We know that graft (boodle, pay-offs, corruption) raises prices for the final consumer. There are enough studies out there that prove it and give numbers for it. And if you pay 50 paise more every time you cross a toll bridge that may or may not be the cost of graft, you...
Expense Account, Mint The murmurs heard are now backed by data. Banks and large corporate distributors are churning mutual fund investors. Mintmutual fund editor Kayezad E. Adajania’s story “Banks nudge investors out of MFs; smart HNIs stay for bull run” (http://bit.ly/aTPn2A) has data to show that banks and large corporate distributors have churned their mutual fund...
Expense Account, Mint This is a story that has been waiting to build scale, to add the four zeros it takes to gather the critical mass to declare something a scam, a bubble, trouble or just messy management. On Tuesday,Mint broke the story about the notional Rs 14,000 crore valuation deficit in three plans run by...