Illustrative reader · Neha
First job, no dependants
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.
Neha started earning last year. She has a salary account, a first credit card, and a vague sense that she should be investing. Nobody depends on her yet, which makes this the cheapest time in her life to get the structure right and the easiest time to postpone it.
Building a credit record, using a card without accumulating debt, starting to invest at all, and resisting the sense that everyone else is already ahead.
22 articles written for this situation
What to Do After Buying a Health Insurance Policy
The half-hour immediately after buying a policy is the cheapest time you will ever have to make it work properly. Almost nobody spends it, and the cost of not spending it appears years later at a hospital desk.
Insurance and protection · 4 min read
How to Build a Simple Goal-Based Investment Portfolio
Most portfolios are collections of things that were bought at some point, not structures designed to deliver anything. Building one properly starts at the goal and works backwards, and it usually ends up smaller than expected.
Goals and asset allocation · 5 min read
Buy the Car Now, or Delay and Invest?
Waiting turns a financing cost into an investment return and buys a cheaper car. It also costs you the use of the car for the whole waiting period, which is the only part of the comparison that is not arithmetic — and usually the part that decides it.
Borrowing and major purchases · 5 min read
CAGR and XIRR — Which One Answers Your Question
Two ways of turning an investment into a single annual rate, suited to two different situations. Using the wrong one does not produce a slightly-off answer; it produces a number that is not measuring your money at all. The rule for choosing between them takes one sentence.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
How to Work Out What Your Monthly Investing Has Actually Returned
Your money went in on many dates and each instalment has been invested for a different length of time. That makes the return a slightly awkward calculation and a very easy one to get wrong — and the two most popular wrong ways go in opposite directions, so people sometimes make both and feel reassured.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
The Cost of Postponing Retirement Contributions
Waiting a few years to start does not cost a few years of contributions. It costs those contributions and every year of growth they would have had, and the arithmetic of catching up later is much less forgiving than it looks from the front.
Retirement and drawdown · 6 min read
Direct and Regular Plans — the Same Fund at Two Prices
Two versions of one scheme, holding the identical portfolio, run by the same manager, differing only in whether a distributor is being paid out of your returns. The difference is a charge, it is disclosed, it compounds, and the only question worth asking is what the higher-priced version is buying you.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
How to Evaluate Financial Advice from Finfluencers
The problem with financial advice on social media is not that the people giving it are stupid. It is that the format rewards confidence, brevity and novelty — three things that are close to the opposite of what good financial advice looks like.
Behaviour and decisions · 6 min read
Why Reinvesting Payouts Changes the Long-Run Result
A payout that is spent is a return you received once. A payout that is put back buys more of the thing that produces payouts, and does so again next time. Over long periods the difference between those two paths is not a detail — and it is the single reason the index figure quoted on the news understates what a shareholder actually got.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
How FOMO Distorts Investment Decisions
The feeling that everyone else is making money is not irrational — it is a reasonable response to genuinely skewed information. What makes it dangerous is that the information reaching you is filtered in a way that guarantees the feeling.
Behaviour and decisions · 5 min read
How an Index Fund Actually Works
An index is a calculation. A fund is a portfolio. Getting the second to follow the first sounds trivial and is not, and the places where it is difficult are exactly where an index fund differs from another one tracking the same index.
Investing and market evidence · 5 min read
How No-Cost EMI Really Works
Somebody is paying the interest. The arrangement is designed so that it is difficult to see who, and the honest way to find out takes one question and one subtraction.
Borrowing and major purchases · 5 min read
NAV, Units and What Happens When You Buy or Sell
The mechanics are simple and are widely misunderstood in one specific way — a low NAV is routinely treated as cheap. It is not, and seeing why takes one paragraph. The rest of this page is the part that actually costs people money: which day's price you get, and what happens when you ask for your money back.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
New Fund Offers and Closed-Ended Funds
A new fund is sold on the two things it cannot have — a record and a price you can judge. A closed-ended one adds a further constraint: you cannot leave when you want to. Both are structural facts rather than accusations, and both are enough to answer most of the question.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
How to Overcome Analysis Paralysis in Financial Decisions
Waiting until you are certain feels like caution and behaves like a decision. In most financial choices the cost of delay is larger than the difference between the options you are agonising over.
Behaviour and decisions · 5 min read
What Risks Do Peer-to-Peer Lending Investors Take?
A platform offering several times a deposit rate is not offering a better deposit. It is offering a different product, and the difference is the risk of not being repaid.
Real assets and alternatives · 5 min read
Do You Need Personal Health Insurance Alongside Employer Cover?
Almost always yes — but the useful question is not whether, it is how much, in what order, and what it should be doing that the employer's policy is not. Buying the wrong shape of cover is a common and expensive way to answer this correctly.
Insurance and protection · 5 min read
How to Rebalance a Portfolio Using New Investments First
The cheapest rebalancing trade is the one you never have to make. Money arriving each month can hold a portfolio near its target for years before anything needs selling.
Goals and asset allocation · 5 min read
What Affects Your Credit Score and How Can You Improve It?
A credit score is not a judgement of your character or your wealth. It is a lender's estimate of one narrow thing — how likely you are to miss payments — built almost entirely from your past behaviour with borrowed money.
Borrowing and major purchases · 7 min read
What Mutual Fund Categories Are For
Fund categories exist so that two funds with the same label hold broadly the same kind of thing, which makes comparison possible and marketing harder. Knowing what the category system is for — and precisely how far its guarantee extends — is more useful than memorising the list.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read
How to Use Credit Cards Without Turning Rewards into Debt
A credit card is a safe payment instrument and an expensive loan, and it is the same object either way. What decides which one you are holding is a system, not willpower.
Borrowing and major purchases · 6 min read
What a SIP Is, and What It Is Not
A systematic investment plan is an instruction, not a product. Understanding that it is only a standing order into a fund clears up most of what people believe about it — including the belief that it is a kind of investment you can be sold, and that it does something to market risk.
Investing and market evidence · 4 min read