Most Recent Articles and Tools

Retirement planning is one of those things that is relatively easy to do (a little forethought and effort go a long way) and yet easy to postpone and regret later.

Targeted saving is a simple technique to save for a specific goal or target. This is very useful when we want to separate a portion of our savings or investments so that it grows independently and doesn't get used for general day to day expenses.

Retirement funds allow us to withdraw from them periodically (monthly or annually). Typically, such funds tend to also have a withdrawal window of about forty years or so. In other words, we would be allowed to withdraw from these starting, say, in our sixties and continue withdrawing till our death.

If you are looking to understand personal finance and to get a bird's eye view of the concepts and topics before diving deeper, you've come to the right place! In this article, we'll look various aspects of personal finance, learn concepts, and proceed to articles that provide details.

In the previous article we looked at stock analysis, and using that, perhaps shortlisted some stocks as good candidates to invest in. In part 2 of the "what to buy" step, we'll look into a simulation technique to explore different investment strategies and their effect on stock performance historically.

It is always a good idea to regularly review our stock investment strategies (including our profile parameters) with our financial advisor, to understand how effective they have been.

In the article Creating Targeted Savings we saw the benefits of saving towards specific targets. The corresponding calculator is here.

Here is a simple calculator to play with our expense/saving/investment ratios to get a feel for how (and how much) to allocate our money towards investments.

The article Early vs Late Retirement Fund Withdrawals described the pros and cons of early withdrawals from a retirement fund. In this calculator, we'll try to illustrate the same with numbers.

The mortgage refinance calculator is used in conjunction with the article Mortgage Refinance. It helps us to quickly compare our existing loan against a newer lower-interest loan.

The article Reducing Debt discusses the importance of debt reduction and its benefits. The simple calculator on this page provides a way to estimate how long and how much it takes to reduce or eliminate debts.

We discussed investing in various articles: Understanding Investment Types, The Power of Compounding, Age-appropriate Investing, etc. The investment calculator here helps in estimating how to allocate our funds.