Here are a few very interesting as well as useful posts on personal finance.

Update: Missed filing your tax returns? For belated tax filing, you can go to taxmunshi.com and use promotion code “MarchforTax” to file your ITR-1 & ITR-2 for no charge. Check the detailed post

Let me start with Deepak Shenoy’s Game of Dice. He writes,

The Mahabharata was fiction, but in real life, if you lose money playing a rigged game, it does you very little good. Lessons needn’t be that expensive. Trading stocks – or even “investing”, whatever the difference may be – is fraught with fraud risk.

Moving on, Goal setting is the core of your financial plan. Manish Chauhan has some advice on getting your visualizations right.

Next, there’s an article on doing the right kind of visualizations.There’s a difference between visualizations and fantasizing. There are dangers of fantasising about future success. And a more effective way of visualising the future is to think about the processes that are involved in reaching a goal, rather than just the end-state of achieving it.

Ramalingam K has two articles on my website about Mental Accounting and Spending Smartly.

As always, I limit myself to 5 links. More next week.

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Busy with content creation for the RupeeCamp, but not that busy to share some very useful links on Insurance, NPS and Tax planning.

Manshu has a post on sample insurance quotes from different Insurers. While price should not be the only factor to take a decision, it’s a good info.

While on Insurance, TheWealthWisher writes on the 7 insurance mistakes to avoid.

ValueresearchOnline likes NPS and while it applauds the Government efforts, their Dill Mange More

Ramalingam K has an article on tax planning and lists out 8 simple ways to plan your taxes

Mathematically Annoying Advertising @ xkcd. Very appropriate for advertising by Indian financial institutions?

Five links should keep you busy?

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Every week I try to share the top 5 things I read and want you to read them too. You can take a look at the past weekly digests.

1. Do you suffer from Learned Helplessness? The post talks about:
The Misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it.

The Truth: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.

2. Deepak Shenoy writes a post on the choice between ULIPs and Mutual Funds. Deepak has a lucid way of explaining fiancial jargons.

3. How to take control of your finances in 2011. JDR says that taking control of your finances can be intimidating — there’s so much to do! — but it doesn’t have to be that way. One effective solution is to take a vacation day from work: designate one specific date as your personal “Money Day”.

4. OneMint has a detailed post on ELSS Mutual Funds. Have you done your tax planning yet? It would be useful if you are still in the tax planning mode.

5. Hindu Business Line has a post on Diversification as a placebo. B Venkatesh says,

Suppose you have 15 stocks in your portfolio. Assume the market crashes and eight stocks in your portfolio fall 20 per cent and the rest fall by less than 10 per cent. You take relief from the fact that you did not lose 20 per cent in the other seven stocks as well! Diversification is the sugar pill that helps us typically drive away our investment blues!

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Read some useful posts on personal finance in the last week and am sharing it with you.

1. Nimesh Shah, Managing director & CEO, ICICI Prudential AMC has an article on what to look for in the next decade. Be Careful, he says. He reminds us that though the last seven years—from 2003 to 2010 — were marked by a significant rally in equity, gold, real estate etc., investors have forgotten the experience prior to 2003 (between 1994 and 2003) — all asset classes were on a plateau. He thinks that the personal finance sector will have to service an India where wealth creation and long-term, conservative financial planning will be the dominant themes. So will be increased uncertainty, especially from global factors. Everything affecting our money will become more exciting, and more challenging.

2. Advisors as behavioural coaches caught my attention too. Excerpts:

…even discerning investors may find it difficult to moderate their emotional and cognitive biases when it comes to their investment decisions. We look at advisors as behavioural investment coaches who set up processes that will enable investors moderate such biases.

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3. Top 8 Stock Picks by Viral Dholakia on Trakin, India Business Blog. Interesting picks but do your own research too.

4. Manish Chauhan has an insightful post on how instant gratification causes problems in personal finance.

5. Deepak Shenoy takes stock of commissions in his Yahoo! column.

Trust 2011 has started well for you. Best!

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‘Tis the time of reviews! Here’s the list of popular blog posts that have been ranked according to the number of visits.

1. How I Made Rs 1,27,535 in One Day!
2. How to Maximize your Income
3. What Is The 88% Solution?
4. How to Get Yourself A Financial Plan
5. The Iceberg Theory of Money Management
6. Open Letter to Kamesh Goyal, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance CEO
7. Implications of the Proposed DTC on ELSS & ULIPS
8. RupeeManager in Private Beta Now
9. Financial Planning Workshop
10. How to Sell ULIPs to Unsuspecting Customers

What was the best post that you read here according to you?

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As you are busy planning to bid farewell to 2010 and welcome 2011, I’ll share just 3 links that can help you with your money resolutions!! They are:

1. Finding Financial Benchmarks and Milestones by JDR. He mentions things like:

* Pay off your student loans.
* Build an emergency fund.
* Learn to negotiate.
* Set a target retirement date.
* Learn to give.

2. TheSimpleDollar review of a book titled, Financial Stupid People Are Everywhere. The author makes the point that of the money we earn, roughly a third goes to government, another third goes towards maintaining what we need, and the other third goes towards maintaining what we want. The problem, of course, is that people are clever at extracting money from that third that defines what we want, either by convincing us that it’s a need or justifying the want. The path to financial freedom is understanding that “want” section: knowing what is and isn’t a need and having control over the things you want.

3. You can’t multitask, so stop trying @HBR Blog. To my mind, stop trying too hard!. The post says,

Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less common, associations — is reduced.

Happy New Year Resolutions!

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Links to interesting posts on personal finance for the week are as under:

1.     Importance of Focus & Confidence by Subramoney: It’s an interesting story and takes potshots at ‘performance seekers’ – they keep jumping from one fund scheme to another. In many cases staying on in the same scheme has helped even if there has been some under performance in a couple of quarters.

2.     Can an Elephant recognize itself in the mirror: The best performers in any field are always very self aware, a point that Abraham Maslow, the renowned psychologist, made well when he said, ‘whereas the average individuals often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are, self-actualizing individuals have superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general’. When it comes to effective leadership in the business world, this assertion rings particularly true.

3.     Financial Statements that you should know: It talks about the goals, income statement, balance sheet, expense statement, asset statement, liability statement.

4.     Personal Finance Q&A Forum by JagoInvestor: Manish Chauhan has a detailed post on the questions and the learnings out of the forum.

5.     Types of Life Insurance @TheWealthWisher: A primer on the types of life insurance covering term insurance, endowment, money back plans, etc.

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