Tax Rates for FY 2009-10

It's that time of the year once again. Everyone must be wondering what is their tax liability and be scampering to save money from being taxed. Let us start by knowing which tax bracket do we fall in for this year: Here is a pictorial presentation of the different tax brackets [courtesy: Outlook Money]: How to arrive at Taxable Income? Taxable Income = Income from (Salary + House Property + Capital Gains + Business/Profession + Other...

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Dividend Delusion

An article from Valueresearchonline.com today: One of the most persistent confusions that mutual fund investors have is with the concept of dividends. Many fund investors seem to think that a mutual fund dividend is some sort of a bonanza, an extra bit of money that comes their way because of something special the fund has done. This is not a fringe belief, yet it is so pervasive that giving out dividends has long been a standard method...

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Skepticism: A tool to investing prowess!

Investing, as they say, is not difficult, but requires a little bit of effort. Skepticism: By definition means, A doubting or questioning attitude or state of mind. If one maintains this doubting state of mind while making investment decisions as well, one can make some really calculated and good decisions. Here are a few examples that Dhirender Kumar of Valueresearchonline gives for this: let's say that a fund distributor wants you...

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Should you Invest Or Repay your Loans?

Found this article on Outlook Money (Dec 30, 2009 issue) and thought to share it on this platform. The traditional wisdom says that you probably shouldn’t be investing while in debt unless you can reasonably expect to outperform the interest rates that you’re paying. In other words, if you’re carrying a high-interest debt, you should focus on getting out of debt instead of building your portfolio. This sounds simpler than it is. What...

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Know your Credit Worthiness

You can now access your Credit Information Report (CIR) directly from CIBIL. As you may be aware, your CIBIL CIR is a factual record of your credit payment history compiled from information received from credit grantors. The purpose is to help credit grantors make informed lending decisions - quickly and objectively, and enable faster processing of your credit applications to help provide you speedier access to credit at better terms. You...

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Tips to tackle Inflation

Inflation as we have discussed, is bad. It affects your buying power as well as it hurts your investments. This is because, the interest on your investments is now worth less than what you were expected to get. The hardest hit are the retired people, who are risk averse and have most of their investments in fixed income instruments. Inflation adjusted rate: ((1+i)/(1+r))-1 x 100 Here, i is the interest rate and r is the inflation. Thus,...

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How does India calculate Inflation?

Continuing from the last post, I'll try to discuss how India calculates Inflation and how is that different from the rest of the world. But first let's discuss what is Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and Consumer Price Index (CPI). Wholesale Price Index - WPI was first published in 1902, and was one of the more economic indicators available to policy makers until it was replaced by most developed countries with the Consumer Price Index in...

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The monster of Inflation

Inflation has been a big cause of concern world over in the recent past, especially in India. So, I thought to present a crash course on this topic today. My source is obviously the ever-expanding Internet. In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time. When the price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation...

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