Expense Account, Mint The ant and the grasshopper story is the ultimate tale of the fight between today and tomorrow. The ant works diligently and saves for a rainy day while the grasshopper fools around. When it rains, the ant is snug as a bug and the grasshopper is wet and hungry. The ant innocently...
Expense Account, Mint It was a particularly dense afternoon. Not only was the August humidity making the lecture theatre of the Delhi School of Economics seem like it was hanging in limbo, but the long strings of equations with tiny symbols alpha, beta, gamma and the sponge-like creature epsilon, made the lemonade stall just 50...
Expense Account, Mint We like to deal with money as a block and are loath to break it up into smaller bits that will do different things. The same pot of money can do a variety of things if put in different products, but we would rather take a neat decision of swinging the whole...
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 When is a good time to invest?” This question comes in the league table of the top five questions around personal money decisions, the others being how much to invest, am I saving enough, what should I invest in and am I doing OK? Though it sounds generic, the question is about...
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
Expense Account, Mint Regulating junk food, TV hours, time on the Internet and phone are parent bugbears. Parenting experts talk about starting small and not using either size or presence to regulate. Because the parent is larger, it tends to use the advantage of size to get the kid to follow rules. And because the...
Expense Account, Mint When we have a lakh we’ll come back. That’s what most Indians going aboard in the 1970s told their round-eyed friends and family at the airport. Of course, they never did, for the lakh soon became 10 and then was forgotten. Five years back, a friend said that he would quit the...
Expense Account, Mint Food prices are seriously out of control. Vegetables that would cost me Rs300 for a week are now at least double that budget. The grocery bill is significantly higher, too. Therefore, I think we need to give raises to household help, driver, car cleaner, press-wallah, the kid who brings the takeaway and...
Expense Account, Mint No, this is not about what this column expects the new government to do for financial sector reform. It is assuming that these are going to be fast-tracked, and along with new products and services, consumers of financial products will bear the burden of too much choice. In his book The Paradox Of Choice,...