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...
Expense Account, Mint Endnote: Those that attempt to manage news do so in a manner that creates impressions. The one impression in the minds of the average consumer of media is this: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) chairman is pushing business towards his former place of work—the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL)—and for...
Expense Account, Mint India is not alone in blindly staggering around for a solution to the problem of getting the last mile correct in retail financial products. I’m back after a week in Seoul (pronounced to rhyme with Yowl), South Korea, as a spousal add-on to a global financial planning congress. Spouses, luckily, were invited...
When I was studying about 20 years ago in the UK, I had two Taiwanese flatmates. We all traded some common must-know phrases over the year that I was there—the favourite being trying to learn “I Love You”. While they tied themselves in knots trying to say that in Hindi, I practised saying hello in...
Expense Account, Mint There is a problem in being good. Or as Gurcharan Das asks in his book, The Difficulty of Being Good, On the Subtle Art of Dharma—“why be good?” The first time I questioned this basic premise that has been drilled into most “service class” people as we call ourselves was many years ago...
If you, the customer, are a day late in a credit card bill payment or a phone or electricity bill, you’re fined. Don’t pay for some time and you begin to get legal notices. The electric supply company will simply cut supply. The phone company will cut the connection. A small error in home loan...
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...