Expense Account, Mint
There is a hilarious mail exchange a friend forwarded me between him and his portfolio management scheme (PMS) “relationship manager”. Friend invests money five years ago and forgets about it. 2011 tax time approaches and he pulls out the PMS to see how it did. Where did my Rs 8 lakh reach after five years of cooking? Rs 9 lakh? Shock and disbelief. It grew 0.87% a year! Does a quick check and finds that the Sensex grew 10% a year over that period. Asks PMS “relationship manager” what happened. PMS manager (I swear I am not making this up) says: look carefully, we actually gave a return of 4.62% per year. You get the figure of 0.87% because the difference is our charges. For managing your money, you see. I’ve advised friend to ride the bus called a mutual fund (buy out of the Mint50 list) and forget about these get-rich-quick PMS schemes. At least he got his money back. His other story… OK, OK, another time.