How much home loan can I get? (Part I)

Buying a home in India, or for that matter anywhere in the world, is a big decision for most people.  It is most likely the single biggest purchase you will ever make in your lifetime.  Gone are the days when one used to save for a lifetime, before finally being able to afford a small home towards the end of your career.  Today India is growing by leaps and bounds, and the average home buying age in India is dropping every year.  The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) estimates that the average age for home buyers in the 1980s was 55-58 years in India.  In stark contrast, since 2000, the average age for first time home buyers for personal use has dropped to 30-38.  Many first time buyers are either just married, or many times choose to buy a home even before marriage.

Inflation in India

Inflation is a much maligned but sometimes poorly understood phenomenon that has the most significant impact on any personal finance plan.  Particularly in a emerging country like India, inflation can be so rampant as to be the fundamental parameter that influences all investing decisions.  Inflation is usually defined as a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.  In the words of noted economist Sam Ewing, it is the reason why you pay $15 for the $10 haircut that you used to get for $5 when you had hair. 

Is 1 Crore enough to retire on in India?

If you had Rs 1Cr (approx USD $200,000) would you be able to retire right now in India? If you need to meet retirement expenses over 30 years, would Rs 1Cr suffice?  How much can you spend monthly, if you need the Rs 1 Cr corpus last over 20 years.  To understand these and several related questions, read on.

Compound Interest 101

Compound interest is the single most interesting and critical factor that impacts all projections of investment growth, retirement corpus accumulation, loan EMIs and payback tenures, etc.  For a concept that is so fundamental to financial theory, compounding can be exceedingly difficult for the average person to understand and fully appreciate.  This is fundamentally because with compound interest, the total corpus grows or declines in an exponential manner.  It is widely believed that the human mind has difficulty comprehending exponential behavior.  For example, Albert Bartlett a US scholar, once commented that "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function".  In economics the exponential growth model is also known as the Malthusian growth model, after the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who authored "An Essay on the Principle of Population", one of the earliest books on population growth rates.

Generational Finance NOT Personal Finance

Just do a google search for Personal Finance, and you will see tons of websites, blogs, articles, marketing pitches etc, all doling out advice on personal finance and how to go about achieving the various goals, investment decisions, savings rates etc associated with it.  It is amazing how much information and guidance gets dished out and consumed relating to this topic.  I guess, Personal Finance gets down to the core of who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and touches every aspect of our lives, which is why it is so hotly discussed, debated, talked about, and basically flogged to death on every financial TV channel, news media, or personal finance blog that you come across.

ET Wealth : Family Finances : Oct31-Nov6 2011

The ET Wealth Online personal finance weekly magazine has a Family Finances section that features one family every week for personal finance advice.  This week they featured a family with a monthly income of Rs 54000 (approx USD $1100)  The article is titled Low income likely to pose a big hurdle.  The first thing that struck me is the financial planner characterizing Rs54K per month as low income.  For an emerging economy like India wherein the average monthly income is in the Rs3000-5000 per month (~USD $100), it is a little strange to consider RS54K per month to be low income.  Probably the planner was taking into the account the financial goals of the family while pronouncing their income as low.

Household Savings Rate : How do we measure up?

It is the last day of the month, and our only sources of monthly income, i.e. our paychecks hit our salary accounts today.  I had talked earlier about shooting for a 85% savings rate, and the need to be able to track this religiously, if we want to have any chance of hitting this super aggressive goal.  We have always struggled to come up with a system to track our expenses.  Either we get too ambitious and try to record every single penny we spend, and end up failing miserably in the attempt, or we become too lazy and forget to track any spending at all.  So we figured the first step was to come up with a simple way to monitor our overall monthly expenses and then refine the method if we see the need for it.  So instead of messing with tracking spreadsheets, notebooks, etc, my wife and I came up with this pretty simple method, that was staring us in the face.  Today, I simply added up my wife's and my monthly October paycheck, and I withdrew 10% of the amount in cash from our nearby ATM.