Die without a will in India, and your family won’t just grieve. They’ll also start a long hunt through banks, fund houses and forms. Take Suresh, 49, the organised one in his family. He had a salary account, a few fixed deposits and mutual fund SIPs running for twelve years. His family knew he “invested…
Your father’s pension covers about half of what the household spends. The rest comes from savings that are shrinking every year. And yet he lives in a paid-off house worth ₹1 crore. Someone at the bank or in the family says, “Why not take a reverse mortgage?” Suddenly you’re wondering whether that’s smart, or a…
Your 80D deduction might be sitting in a drawer right now. It’s February, your payroll team has sent the “submit your tax-saving proofs” email, and you’re holding a health insurance receipt you paid for your parents last summer. Is it worth ₹25,000 in deductions? ₹50,000? Does it count at all if you’ve picked the new…
CTC vs in-hand salary is the gap that caught Suresh, 44, completely off guard. His offer letter said ₹18 lakh a year. He divided by twelve, got ₹1.5 lakh a month, and told his wife they could finally prepay a chunk of the home loan. Then the first salary arrived. About ₹1.08 lakh. If that…
International mutual funds sound simple until you try to buy one. Suresh, 46, sat with his cousin at a family function last month. The cousin swore that putting money into US funds was the smartest thing he’d ever done. Suresh went home, opened his app, found a US-focused fund, and hit a wall: “Fresh subscriptions…
Ramesh, 38, works in a mid-sized IT firm in Pune. He has a ₹1 crore term plan he bought seven years ago, right after his first daughter was born. Sounds responsible, right? Except his salary has more than doubled since then, he’s taken on a home loan of ₹65 lakh, and his second child arrived…
Suresh is 51, works in sales in Pune, and has been “meaning to write a will” for six years. Each time he sits down, the same questions stop him. Do I need a lawyer? What if I word something wrong? Isn’t this for people with bungalows and business empires? So the page stays blank. And…
SCSS vs PMVVY in 2026: Why This Comparison Doesn’t Work Anymore Suresh, a 61-year-old retired bank manager from Coimbatore, walked into his nearest LIC branch last month with a fixed deposit maturity cheque for ₹15 lakh in hand. He’d read somewhere that PMVVY — the Pradhan Mantri Vaya Vandana Yojana — was the safest way…
Ramesh has been filing his own taxes for eleven years. He’s not scared of a spreadsheet. But last month, when his cousin in Bengaluru mentioned she’d started getting a bigger HRA exemption than him — same salary, same rent, different city — he just stared at his payslip for a while. Had he been doing…
Ramesh, a 45-year-old bank manager from Nagpur, called me last month sounding almost apologetic. “I’ve been investing in a multi-cap fund for six years,” he said. “Yesterday my colleague told me I should have picked a flexi-cap fund instead. Now I don’t know if I made a mistake.” Ramesh isn’t alone — the debate over…