For an expensive online purchase, do you pay in full or take the benefit of an EMI scheme? Depending on the range of credit cards you have and the ongoing offers, you may have the following options during checkout: Full upfront payment. Full upfront payment with discount. Interest-EMI without discount: The EMIs add an interest… Continue Reading
A common answer is 35-40% of the net take home salary. If you search on the internet, you will get an answer in a similar range. The banks may also have internal guidelines where they may not let your loan EMIs exceed a certain percentage of your net salary. When it comes to financial planning,… Continue Reading
Struggling with credit card debt? You make small payments on your credit card every month, but the debt just does not seem to go down. Why Does This Happen? Because credit cards are the most expensive debt in the formal finance sector. The interest rate ranges from 36% to 45% p.a. While you may be… Continue Reading
The Reserve Bank has come out with two separate circulars in the middle of August 2023. First about levy of penal interest and the second about the reset of interest rate in retail floating rate loans. We discussed both these topics when the RBI broached these topics for the first time. Coming Soon: EMI Defaults… Continue Reading
You take a Rs 50 lacs home loan for 15 years at 8% p.a. The EMI for the loan shall be Rs 47,782. Interest rates keep changing. When the interest rate rises, the default bank action is to keep the EMI constant and increase the loan tenure. Let’s say the interest rate for your loan… Continue Reading
That’s how it should be, right? Longer home loan tenure means you want a longer period to repay the home loan. And that can happen only if you repay the loan slowly. Still, when I wrote about a 40-year home loan product a few weeks back and discussed how you would have paid only ~15%… Continue Reading
Bajaj Housing Finance has extended the tenure of its home loan products for new borrowers up to a maximum of 40 years. We are not used to seeing home loans of 40-year tenure. Before this, the maximum I had heard was 30 years. So, that’s a sharp jump. I don’t want to go into specifics… Continue Reading
ICICI Bank has launched an EMI facility for UPI payments under its ICICI PayLater product. With this, you can scan a UPI QR code from the UPI app and purchase using an instant EMI facility. So, you purchase an item worth Rs 15,000 and instantly convert this into 3 EMIs of say Rs 5,200 each.… Continue Reading
RBI has increased repo rate from 4% p.a. to 6.5% p.a. since May 2023. If your home loan is benchmarked to RBI Repo rate, that means a hike of 2.5% in your home loan interest rate. Impact of Interest Rate Hike on Your Loan Tenure Usually, the default option in case of interest rate hike… Continue Reading
You spend a big amount on your credit card. You do not have the money to settle the bill in full by the due date. You decide to pay off the debt over the next few months. That means you won’t pay the bill in full right away. You will keep paying whatever you can… Continue Reading