This may sound strange, but this may indeed be true for many taxpayers. Why? Because the Union Budget 2023 has incentivized the New Tax regime in a big way by reducing the tax rates in the various income slabs. And the New Tax regime does NOT give you any tax benefits for tax-saving investments. No… Continue Reading
The Union Budget 2023 is round the corner. Are you ready with your wish list? What do you want from this budget? Lower taxes? Higher tax deductions? Additional tax exemptions? The Budget announcements may not meet all your demands/wishes since the Government must strike the right balance between populism, targeted incentives, and tax collections. Still,… Continue Reading
Interest does not take holidays. That’s right. When you take a loan, you pay interest for every day you have borrowed. When you make a fixed deposit, the bank pays you interest for each day. For interest, there is no concept of working and non-working days, festivals, and national holidays. However, in the case of… Continue Reading
A quick disclaimer to begin. My favourite tax-saving investment does not have to be your favourite tax-saving investment and we can always agree to disagree. We discussed “Things to consider before investing in a tax-saving product” in an earlier post. The post is a good primer on how to think about your tax-saving choices. My… Continue Reading
You have a home loan with an overdraft facility (such as SBI Maxgain). Where would you send your excess money? Transfer to your overdraft account or to your EPF/PPF account? Let us find out. The Benefits of Overdraft Account By putting money in the overdraft account, you save on interest. And interest saved is interest… Continue Reading
The tax-saving season is round the corner. Are you still running around to finalize tax-saving investments? Well, there are so many ways to save tax. There is PPF, EPF, NPS, ELSS, LIC policies, ULIPs, 5-year FDs, life and health insurance plans, pension plans and many more. In this post, I do not intend to discuss… Continue Reading
You just got your annual bonus. You want to decide between whether to use the bonus to prepay the home loan. Or put this money away in a bank fixed deposit or any other investment. The approach is simple. If the post-tax cost of your loan is HIGHER than the post-tax return from the supposed… Continue Reading
Question 1: Interest rates have gone down. I want to buy a house. While I can fund the purchase with own funds, I think taking a home loan is a good idea since the interest rates are low. I can earn a higher return than the loan interest rate on my investments. Plus, I will… Continue Reading
The Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, presented the Union Budget 2020 in the parliament yesterday. In this post, let’s look at the highlights of the Budget proposal. We will look at the proposals from personal taxation perspective only. #1 Restructuring of Income Tax Slabs, Lowering of Personal Tax Rates and a Choice There is a major… Continue Reading
In an earlier post, we had discussed a quick and cheap way to get a loan, Loan against your PPF account. Even though the loan window is open for only a short period and the loan amount is not likely to be very big, a PPF loan is an option if you are looking for… Continue Reading