Page - 88 Personal Finance and Investment Blog

On our facebook page, a friend of scripbox (Mr Pradeep Arora) asked us a question and got us thinking. "I like your humour and your concept in that order. I will take a test drive for sure. One thing i cannot figure out is that why cant you offer a comprehensive basket. I would have loved to see some equity oriented hybrid funds and debt funds also. Maybe they could have formed a different package. or maybe you could have given a age oriented allocation of the total corpus. One thing that i struggle with is to figure out how much should be allotted to which type of fund (I am 53 yrs)."

Debt Funds, with longer term duration, but predominantly investing in government bonds are down over 5% in the past couple of months. I have spoken with a few people who seem to have got into these funds with the assumption that their capital cannot depreciate if you invest in a government bond fund, and rather surprised to see a fall in value of the NAV over the past month.

Expected returns from equity investments are higher than fixed income, but taxed far less. We keep hearing the refrain that equities in the last few years haven't even kept up with FDs. There are two fallacies here:

A question we get asked very often is, "Is this really a good time to invest in equity or equity mutual funds?".

In the last post we discussed why it is important for us to understand the risks that could affect our ability to achieve our investment goals.

As investors, what we are really trying to do is to ensure that we have enough money for a goal in the future.

In this article, we're going to discuss a common myth that holds you back from making the most of your investments. We would love to hear back from you on what you think.

How financial jargon destroys investor confidence and keeps them from investing

Beating the market is a goal for every active investor – but only a few succeed. Apart from proving how smart you are, beating the market is obviously better for your investments. But did you know how much?

Here is the eye-popping truth: On Dec 30, 2011, the difference in 10 year performance of the best performing equity mutual fund and the worst performing one was a whopping 24% - annualised!

Quite often we are asked, why should one invest in equities. The Indian economy is gloomy. Political instability tends to hog most pages of the news papers. The global economy is not supporting the news flow in any way. In this uncertain scenario, why should one take a Risk At all? Why not put all your money in a safe haven of ‘Debt’.

Financial planning theory recommends a methodical approach to investing