Book excerpt in Mint
Expense AccountPersonal FinanceUncategorizedJanuary 21, 2014by Monika Halan0Don’t wait till you get to the hospital to buy medical cover
We wait for the emergency to hit before we begin planning for it. Bad idea. Be the ant. Nothing stops you from being a cool ant.
Expense Account, Mint Two years ago, I had a dream. It was vivid as some dreams are. A giant elephant was being taken to be chained up. I remember waking up traumatized at the anguish of the animal at being pulled, pushed and dragged back to the place from where it had so recently got...
Expense Account, Mint You book a Delhi-Mumbai flight and the online travel site says the journey will take two hours. It takes four due to sudden bad weather. Would you use that site again? Sure—it wasn’t the fault of the site that the weather turned bad. Let’s complicate the story. Your paediatrician advises you against...
Expense AccountAugust 7, 2013by Monika Halan0To spot a future problem
Expense Account, Mint When retail investors begin to jump onto an investment idea that is either complicated or offers very high returns or both, you know that the end is near. We never hear of investors rushing suddenly to the idea that large-cap funds are so cool. Or that the Public Provident Fund is the...
Expense AccountJuly 24, 2013by Monika Halan0Joint family finances: minefield of embedded emotional boms
Expense Account, Mint It’s been just over five months since I began doing a weekly personal finance show on Bloomberg India TV. Called Smart Money, the show is about offering strategies to people who are looking for hands-free money management. It’s for people who want to put in place a grid that they can service...
Expense Account, Mint So it comes to pass that Aniruddha Bahal (the editor of Cobrapost.com, the online magazine that caught on camera bankers in over 20 banks across the country offering to launder money) is after all not blackmailing the banks. Neither, it seems, was he shorting bank stocks. The banking regulator fined 22 banks...
Expense AccountJuly 10, 2013by Monika Halan0Overdue RBI wealth management guidelines low on deterrence
Expense Account, Mint The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) long overdue guidelines on wealth management and distribution of financial products such as insurance policies and mutual funds by banks were uploaded on its website on 28 June. The guidelines can be accessed here:http://bit.ly/11xD6DZ and comments sent to the RBI till the end of July. The final...
Expense Account, Mint When I began researching why we count gold on the current account and not the capital account, I was simply seeking an answer to what looked like an illogical classification of a metal we know to be an asset. And as it is with most things, once you start pulling at a...
Expense Account, Mint Why do gold imports get counted in the current account and not the capital account in a country’s balance of payment (BoP) accounts? The origin of the question stems from the unfairness of the wholesale blame that Indian household gets for soaking up a quarter of the yearly world demand for gold...