Conviction of Mind

If you are a salaried person, you'd have seen a HRA component in your salary. Also, you'd have known that you can save tax on whatever rent you pay. Once you have the rental receipts from your house owner, you can fill in the following excel sheet to know how much you can exempt tax from your income. Please edit only those in the yellow color and you can find the other details getting modified automatically. If you enter your basic, your HRA is also modified for the first time. This is because most of the time the basic and HRA are inter related. It is mostly 40% of your basic pay. In the example shown above, the basic pay is Rs. 8000/- and Rent paid is Rs. 5000/- But, It is not worth showing more than Rs.4000/- as it doesn't affect your tax exemption in any way. Also, you will be eligible for exemption only if you pay rent for more than Rs.800/- in this case. In this case, the tax excluded is 3200/-, in which case, you save the tax on that amount based on your tax slab. ...

Kotak Securities had announced a referral scheme during the October 2008. I was a customer with Kotak then and they sent a mail to me as well about the referral scheme. Actually, at that time, two of my friends were also interested in opening a brokerage account and I helped them in getting one in Kotak. There was a big hurdle for one of them while opening, but still managed to open the accounts successfully during the period mentioned in the mail. As per the mail sent to me, I was supposed to receive a IPOD for referring two friends. But I got a call recently confirming my gift is packed and sent to my address and they say my gift is 'Ferrari RED perfume' (How funny!!). On further enquiry, I found that they didn't include the second person's referral because his initial opening amount was Rs.20550/- and not above 50000. This came as a surprise to me and I found that they have included this clause after sending a mail to the kotak account holders to refer. My perspectiv...

There are two fruits, say banana and apple, in a basket. If you were given an OPTION to take one of the fruit, which one will you take? Notice the word OPTION in the above sentence. You are given a choice between two fruits. Say, now a security is at Rs.5000/-. You think it will go to Rs.5500/- in a month. If you have Rs.20000/- for trading, you can buy only 4 now and sell it after a month. If you opt for OPTIONS, you can buy at a lesser price and gain more. For Rs.20000, you could get an option for buying 80 (approx.) securities (each Rs.5000/-). CASE I: ----------- After a month, if the security price is Rs.5500/-, You would gain => (5500 - 5000) * 80 = 40000. But you have already given 20000 to get the option. So, your profit would be Rs. 20000/- => 100% return in just a month :-) CASE II: ------------ After a month, if the security price is Rs.4000/- you have already spent Rs.20000/- on getting the option. Total Loss: Rs. 20000/- (Already spent on getting option. You will no...

For those who are new to booking ticket in IRCTC, take a look at my previous post . There is some good news for the IRCTC users. You are in no need to search for your ID card while booking your ticket. Also, you can take the print-out of the mail sent to you and travel with that. The only thing is at least one person mentioned in the booked ticket should have his ID card to show it to the TTE/TTR. These are the recent set of instructions for e-Ticket bookers in IRCTC There is a introduction of "Side Middle" in few of the trains and it does improve the revenue for the government. But it puzzles even frequent travellers!! More puzzle comes on the way when you booked a upper birth and got a side middle birth. Sometimes TTEs rectify this and sometimes they don't. Even if the ticket say S5 35/ UB, you will be alloted Side Middle. Can you spot out why? When you booked the ticket the system was programmed to have 8 births / compartment. Now, after the introduction of Side Midd...

Computers are ubiquitous and it hasn't left Indian Railways behind. IRCTC is a site for booking train tickets online. Unlike the booking of air tickets, IRCTC accept your debit cards as well. So, those who don't like credit cards (for any matter), can use this site to book tickets online without any fuss. Even now, I can see so many people standing in a long queue to book their tickets! If you know how to create a e-mail online, then you can book a train ticket as well. It will take about 5 minutes to book a ticket online when you have all the other information handy. You can use many other sites to check for the availability and then carry on to this site to book the ticket online. Better use e-ticket option There are two options in the site. one is i-ticket and the other e-ticket. When you choose i-ticket, the ticket booked will be delivered at your doorstep. When you choose e-ticket, the ticket will be instantly delivered through your printer! Even if you don't have a p...

I will demystify the ULIP plan, which is widely used everywhere now-a-days! To state it fast and simple, it is a plan with both Investment and Insurance with Tax benefit. Sounds cool? But it isn't really. Lets see how. ULIP is Unit Linked Insurance Plan, which means they are going to invest in shares (similar to mutual fund) and also give insurance in the meantime as well. There are charges (hidden) everywhere. There are Fund Management charge, Mortality charge, Allocation charge etc., for a ULIP plan and this will be more in the first few years based on the plan. Usually, based on the plan, I year - 15% to 65% II year - 3% to 15% III year - 3% to 15% There is not much charges from the third year in plans offered by few companies out there. So, where these high charges go? Do they really need this much for managing your fund? 1. There should be some amount for giving you insurance and this can't and shouldn't be invested. So, it constitutes fair percentage based on your ...

I downloaded Google chrome and using it for the past few days. Google chrome is the new browser just released by Google, which is going to compete against the giants Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Recently released Firefox 3.0 made records in downloads. Google chrome released its BETA version recently as a open source only for WINDOWS Operating system to get some quick feedback. A quick snapshot of Google chrome is here. Really Good things about Google Chrome: (1) No Browser Crash Anymore : When you open many sites in the browser, it might cause it to act slow or crash sometimes. The crash sometimes happen when it downloads some data recursively or some large data or for numerous other reasons. Yesterday, I was using Google chrome. I opened a page which had some flash page running and it was actually crashed! But it didn't crash the whole browser. Yeay!!! I love it... Actually, it displayed that there was something crashed in all the other windows...