Illustrative reader · Meera
Supporting parents and teenagers at once
Illustrative composite readers, used to open articles with a situation rather than a definition. They are NOT real people, NOT customers, and NOT case studies. Every persona page says so in its own text, because this site's credibility rests on never presenting an invented thing as a found one, and fictional people are the one invented thing we do publish.
Meera is at the point where two generations need her at the same time. Her parents are ageing and one of them has a condition that predates any policy she could buy them. Her children are a few years from decisions that cost a great deal.
Health cover for elderly parents, planning education costs including overseas, and deciding which goal loses when they cannot all be funded.
16 articles written for this situation
How Career Breaks and Pay Gaps Affect Retirement Income
A break from paid work costs more than the salary forgone, and the extra costs are invisible because nobody sends a bill for them. Making them visible is what allows a household to share them fairly instead of leaving them where they happen to land.
Retirement and drawdown · 5 min read
Cashless or Reimbursement: How Health Insurance Claims Differ
Both routes pay the same policy. They differ in who is out of pocket while it is being decided, and in what happens if part of the bill is disallowed — which is why the choice matters most to the people least able to absorb it.
Insurance and protection · 5 min read
Why Children Should Not Be Your Retirement Plan
The arrangement where children support their parents in old age worked when families were large, lived together and lived shorter lives. Every one of those conditions has changed, and the plan that rests on them has quietly stopped being a plan.
Retirement and drawdown · 6 min read
How to Evaluate a Financial Product Before Buying It
Most financial products can be assessed with the same short set of questions, regardless of what they are called. The questions are dull, they take about twenty minutes, and almost nobody asks them before signing.
Behaviour and decisions · 5 min read
How to Choose an Inflation Assumption for a Financial Goal
Every long-term plan rests on a guess about how fast prices will rise, and most people make that guess once and never look at it again. The record shows why a single number is the wrong shape of answer.
Goals and asset allocation · 7 min read
How to Choose the Form of Gold for a Future Gold Purchase
Owning gold and owning the thing the gold is for are not the same, and the gap between them is made of costs. The form to hold depends entirely on what the gold has to become.
Real assets and alternatives · 5 min read
How to Evaluate an Education Loan Without Ignoring Repayment Risk
The loan is sanctioned against the admission. It is repaid out of a career that has not happened yet, and the gap between those two facts is where the whole risk sits.
Borrowing and major purchases · 6 min read
How to Create a Family Financial Continuity File
Most of the financial distress that follows a death or a serious illness comes from paperwork nobody completed rather than money nobody saved. An afternoon fixes it, and almost nobody spends the afternoon.
Insurance and protection · 5 min read
What to Do When a Health Insurance Claim Is Rejected
A rejection is a decision, not a verdict. A significant share of them turn on documentation or procedure rather than on whether the treatment was covered — and those are the ones that get reversed by somebody who asks the right question in writing.
Insurance and protection · 5 min read
How Global Gold Prices and the Rupee Affect Gold in India
The gold price an Indian buyer pays is three things multiplied together and several more added on. Knowing which one moved explains most of what looks mysterious about it.
Real assets and alternatives · 5 min read
How a Family Can Structure a Term Insurance Payout
A term insurance payout arrives as a single large sum at the worst moment a family will ever have to make financial decisions. Almost everything that protects it is decided before it arrives.
Insurance and protection · 5 min read
How to Build a Medical Buffer When Health Insurance Is Unavailable
Self-funding medical risk is worse than insuring it, and for some people it is the only option left. Doing it deliberately, with a named reserve and a written plan, is very different from hoping.
Insurance and protection · 4 min read
How to Plan for a Child's Education Costs in Stages
An education is not one bill. Treating it as a single future amount produces a total that is wrong and a portfolio that cannot deliver it, and both errors come from the same place.
Goals and asset allocation · 6 min read
How to Plan Financially for Elderly Parents
The work here is mostly not financial. It is finding out what exists, making sure more than one person can reach it, and having the conversation while there is still time to have it calmly.
Goals and asset allocation · 6 min read
How to Plan for Overseas Education Costs and Currency Risk
An overseas degree is an education goal with a second uncertainty stacked on top of it. The exchange rate can move the cost by more than the fees do, and it moves in a direction nobody can plan around by forecasting.
Goals and asset allocation · 6 min read
Why Published Inflation Is Not Your Inflation
The national figure is a weighted average of price changes across a basket somebody built to represent a typical household. You are not a typical household, and the further your spending sits from the average mix, the less the published number describes your experience — which is why it so often feels wrong.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read