Expense Account, Mint As I read through the pages and pages of questions from viewers sent by my producer for the weekly show that Mintdoes with NDTV, one distinct pattern emerges. Most people have the makings of a financial plan, but are simply unsure of how to proceed. Going to the next step means knowing that...
Expense Account, Mint Armed with basic knowledge of an Excel sheet and some dribbles of wisdom after a basic capital markets course, when I opened a unit-linked insurance plan (Ulip) brochure five years ago and tried to do the math, I fell off my chair. The sheet showed me a product that was so inherently...
Expense Account, Mint When is a good time to invest?” This question comes in the league table of the top five questions around personal money decisions, the others being how much to invest, am I saving enough, what should I invest in and am I doing OK? Though it sounds generic, the question is about...
Expense Account, Mint So you read the headlines on Tuesday about the hike in the home loan rates and are wondering what to do: prepay that home loan or let it run on and allow investments to continue. I call it the classic “prepay or invest” fork in the road that the urban mass affluent...
Expense Account, Mint While we were used to the mutual fund industry complaining about its regulator, soft voices against the regulator are surfacing in the life insurance industry as well—and they sound very surprised. The funds were used to a tough regulator, but the insurance industry is a bit open-mouthed by the sudden turnaround in...
Expense Account, Mint ’ve written in this space before asking why my BlackBerry stayed on the grid in a remote mountain village where basic banking was missing. A few years earlier I had argued for a model that would make financial services as ubiquitous as paan masala, glucose biscuits and shampoo sachets in remote rural India....
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
Expense account, Mint here is a famous saying: you count hours and days, while the years just fly by. This looks certainly true of changes in the road rules around banking, insurance and mutual fund products in the year gone by in the world’s second fastest growing economy. It takes a sweeping look at the...
Expense Account, Mint Why has cost become so central to the insurance product? Nobody talked about costs for decades when we all bought endowment and money-back plans. Those of us who are old enough to have these in our portfolio remember how they were sold—the promise was of a certain sum that would come back,...