Expense Account, Mint It’s been three weeks since I left home. Three weeks since I stitched together another reality in a different country, with different people using Skype and Gtalk as a way to keep the thread of my other reality going. Three weeks that saw two natural disaster events in the US—an earthquake that...
Expense Account, Mint I’ve long thought about how to handle the barrage of mail and calls from readers, viewers, friends and family asking for help to deal with a financial problem. The most worrisome are those that complain about a case of mis-selling, that is, the sale of a financial product by a banker, agent...
Expense Account, Mint Introduced to Westerns some 15 years ago, they are now my best de-stress read. Among them the stack of Louis L’Amour books takes up an entire bookshelf. While at one level the books are about guns and fights, read as a series, it is one giant story of the settlement of a...
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 ’ve written in this space before asking why my BlackBerry stayed on the grid in a remote mountain village where basic banking was missing. A few years earlier I had argued for a model that would make financial services as ubiquitous as paan masala, glucose biscuits and shampoo sachets in remote rural India....
Expense Account, Min My phone rings. It is an uncle who has just turned 60 wanting to know if he was doing the right thing with his retirement corpus. He’d called in a neighbour’s kid for advice. The kid works in a large private sector bank. She offered a bouquet of unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips)...
Expense Account, Mint Each time the stock markets hit a new high, retail investors kick themselves for not buying more the previous week; those still deciding when to buy kick themselves for their bad timing. When Indian markets hit a two-year high ealier this week, people wondered: Is it a good time to invest or...
Expense Account, Mint We left off last week at the point where surplus cash from the Income Box begins to fill the Wealth Box. A quick recap: Dhan Chakra, or the circle of wealth, is a system that gives one a mind map of a life cycle of money flows and the place of various financial...
Expense Account, Mint One of the reasons the new pension system (NPS) had got good previews before launch was due to the tiny costs the scheme carried. However, newspaper edits this week suggest that there is fine print to be looked at and that the product is not as cheap as touted. The criticism also...
Expense Account, Mint Imagine that you are the manager of a school cafeteria. The school offers a wide range of food and beverages. Suppose research shows that no matter what is at the top of the list, the top three items get ordered more than the rest on the menu. If the manager writes out...