Vijaibabu's Blog - Personal Finance Guide for Financial Freedom

Your financial plan is one which chalks out your financial goals and how you plan to achieve them. As the situations in life change, your financial plan also requires regular reviewing and change. Just as how you undergo regular health checkups to review your health and regular service for your vehicle or electronic appliances, your financial plan also needs regular examination. Here are a few reasons on when it becomes important to review your financial plan: Change in financial conditions: The first reason why you should review your financial plan regularly is to reflect any change in your financial conditions - be it internal or external. Sometimes you realise when you review that you have not progressed much towards your goals despite a considerable time having lapsed. This requires you to change your investment plan, and sometimes other goals as well - for instance, you can retire later than you initially planned, or settle to buy a house which is lower in value than what you

Selling one's home is never a very easy thing to do. Usually, the four walls one is putting on the market are the frame for many fond memories, and one needs to say goodbye to the neighbours and familiar sights that have often defined many years of residence.  But over and above the emotional upset of selling a home, not keeping a record of the actual sale transaction can lead to problems later on.    Maintain a file of all documents pertaining to the property sale. This will ensure that you are able to address all future queries by the buyer, the bank involved and the municipal or tax authorities. Also read: Why Land Bill is giving sleepless nights to developers  You will especially need a seamless financial record while filing your tax returns for the year of sale. The documents should include proof and receipts of payment for items that you had included in the sale price, including parking space, structural modifications or additions which enhanced the value of the property,

1. Performance Ranking  More than the recent or long term performance of any scheme its ranking among peers should be looked at. To find out the ranking you need to check out the quartile ranking which will show how the fund has performed quarter on quarter among its peer group. In quartile ranking each quartile comprises of 25 percent of peer group schemes. So one may select the scheme which has remained in top quartile most of the time. If at all you find your scheme going below 3rd quartile in a couple of consecutive quarters it hints that time has come to exit the scheme. You can find these rankings from the factsheets of various AMCs and also on some mutual funds research websites  2. Ratio analysis Risk and return ratios like standard deviation, Sharpe ratio etc.  I have discussed in my earlier article on Measuring Mutual funds risk. Along with those ratios, one also should check out the ALPHA of the fund.  Alpha tells us what extra or less the fund manager has generated ou