India Personal Finance Websites 2015

Its been a while since I discussed the many and increasing set of resources available to personal finance beginners, learners, enthusiasts, journeymen, tax-savers, investors, traders, pundits, believers and their tribesmen and kin.  Since 2011, when I first blogged about a few sites that I had come across (India Personal Finance Websites 2011), the number and variety have increased in leaps and bounds.  

Here is a small set that I am most familiar with.  Please let me know if there are others that you find interesting.  I have also included a couple of lines for each site, describing my perspective of the site. We all approach our reading material from our own personal perspective, so please regard this as my view on the site content.  Yours could be different.  The key is to keep reading, keep learning, and keep contributing

Retire Early : Increase your Networth

The holy grail of early retirement is to push your networth up as quickly as you possibly can to help meet your retirement goal.  I have earlier described how to arrive at your networth target. Today I will focus on the efforts I have put in over the years to build out my overall corpus, and the results of that rather arduous exercise.  I say arduous because it certainly has not been easy going to try and watch your networth grow slowly in spite of the challenges you face everyday.  Here is a description of my journey so far, and some tips on how I have gotten here.  Read on, and feel free to provide me ideas and suggestions on what I should be doing going forward.  I certainly need all the help I can get to realize my dreams.

RBI : To Cut or not to Cut, that is the question!

The RBI June policy review meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, and the Indian markets and economy will be waiting with bated breath to see what RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has to offer this time around.  

This time general consensus is predicting, almost demanding, a 0.25% repo rate cut.  A few optimists are in fact suggesting that a 0.5% repo rate cut might be on the cards.  I for one think Raghu will stay with a 0.25% repo rate cut.  

The CRR (Cash Reserve Ratio) might also see a cut of upto 0.5% depending on how much liquidity the RBI governor wants to release into the markets. 

Both of the above should provide a healthy uptick to the Indian stock markets tomorrow.  The repo rate cut of 0.25% is probably already baked into the market, so only a higher rate cut will move the needle.  On the flip side, no rate cut will be a huge downer, leading to a large fall in the indices.

The CRR impact may not be immediate, but should help overall.

As always rate sensitives like banks, NBFCs, Auto and Auto ancillaries, will benefit the most from any reduction in the repo rate.  I am also hoping that long term GILT funds will benefit from any interest rate reductions coming up.  I had reiterated my resolve to build up a position in GILT funds late last year in december.   Since then, I have been slowly accumulating GILTs.  The performance has not been spectacular, but it hasn't been a loss either.  I will come back after this monetary policy review with some performance analysis of long term GILT funds, in a falling interest rate scenario.

Till then, here is hoping Raghu gives us a helping hand!

NIFTY50 beats DOWJONES in last decade : NIFTY comparison to DJIA 2004 to 2014

Nowadays the buzz word in equity investing seems to be diversification and globalization.  Every news channel that you see will be awash with pundits describing the benefits of diversification, and exposure to international equity as one such avenue.  But this is something I wanted to check out and figure for myself.  The best way would be to simply compare the performance of the Indian stock markets vs a major international stock index, and the obvious one that comes to mind is the US stock market.  So I set out to compare the performance of the NIFTY 50 as a proxy for the Indian stock markets, vs the DOW JONES Index, which is a proxy for the US stock markets.  This analysis is useful in 2 scenarios.  There are several NRI investors who struggle to decide whether to keep their investments in the US, or deploy them back home in India.  There are also India based investors wanting to get a piece of the US market action in the name of diversification.  Both these investors are looking for the same thing, which is the best returns on their investment Dollars or Rupees.  In this article I have attempted a simple comparison of the US and Indian stock markets, by contrasting the NIFTY vs the DOW.  The results certainly surprised me!  Why don't you take a look for yourself here.

Am I Earning Enough

Being a salaried employee, the bulk of my dreams of an early retirement are funded by what my corporate employer chooses to pay me every year.  My fortunes are inextricably linked to my salary.  I have tried over the years to build a secondary stream of passive income, but progress has been slow on this front.  So I figured I should take a minute to get a handle on my salary progressing over my working career. It took me a while to dig up the data, since this is something I have never really separately tracked. I have always focused on my networth, and my savings rate, but never really looked at how much my income is, and more importantly, how it has been increasing/decreasing over the years.

NSDL CAS : One stop window into all your investments

One of the most common challenges of the early retirement or personal finance enthusiast, is the ability to meaningfully track all their investments from a common platform.  The investment avenues are so diverse in India, that typically your investment universe is spread across everything from your friendly neighborhood banks, online brokerage portals, MF AMCs, online portfolio management tools, your own local excel spreadsheets, insurance agents, relationship managers, post-offices, and the list can go on and on.  How does one really manage all of these different avenues, and more importantly is there a single platform from which you can access and view all your different investments?  If this sounds familiar, read on.

Quotes : Do It NOW!

A good plan violently executed NOW is better than a perfect plan executed next week

-George S Patton