Money Matters

  We have been adopting investment in bank & post office deposits as a default option without giving it much thought. At a time when interest rates were lucrative, the necessity of such analysis was also never felt. However, with the declining trend of interest rates, achieving financial targets might have become difficult. Reviewing fresh investments, adopting course correction in existing ones, and appropriate action can help achieve financial targets. The interest variation is also a risk that can hit our preconceived financial targets. The illustration below will shed some light on this aspect. Mr. Ram & Mr. Lakhan, both started creating their children's education fund in 2010. They set the target of Rs. 30 Lakh by 2025. Accordingly, they invested Rs. 9 Lakh in 5-year bank deposits. The rate of interest over 8.5% PA was good enough to catch the target in 15 years. However, at renewal, interest rates fell to @7.5% PA in 2015. Mr. Ram understood the interest variation r...

Creating corpus for our children's wedding is not something new for all of us; but as time has progressed, there have resulted in many societal and cultural changes. Thus in such a scenario, the traditional way to estimate fund requirement is no longer effective or useful. The success of the ‘wedding corpus’ depends solely upon its adequacy to conduct the event successfully, and in line with expectations driven by the prevailing culture. Hence, it is clear that the importance of societal and cultural changes creates an undeniable impact on this ‘wedding corpus’. This blog shall discuss the same in detail, which is the social & cultural shift that has occurred with respect to weddings, and how that, in turn, affects our outlook towards the “wedding corpus” estimation. A note of caution, the changes being enlisted and observed currently are dynamic in nature and hence are subject to change over a period of time. Thus, when it’s the turn of your kids to get married, there may oc...