Sandesh Goel

Update: Debt funds no longer have the tax advantage effective April 1, 2023. Debt funds are now taxed as ordinary income irrespective of the duration of investment. As a follow up to my earlier post exploring the best investment approach for debt allocation ( https://sandeshgoel.blogspot.com/2023/02/investing-in-gilt-funds-as-compared-to.html ), I set out to find some of the Target Maturity Gilt funds available today. Interestingly, in all the AMC websites I looked at, they don't list these funds in the Debt category. Instead they show up in the Index or Other funds categories, which makes them notoriously hard to find for the uninitiated. I am therefore creating a list of all target maturity gilt funds that I could find for anyone who needs this information. I am only including funds which include G-Secs or SDLs, not PSUs. ICICI Prudential AMC https://www.icicipruamc.com/mutual-fund/other-funds/icici-prudential-nifty-sdl-sep-2026-index-fund---growth https://www.icicipruamc.com/mut...

Over the last few years, I have internalised the importance of Asset Allocation in planning the personal finances, especially for long term goals such as retirement.  Deciding Asset Allocation There are many formulas for asset allocation that you will find floating around, but what I have realised is that your ideal asset allocation has much more to do with your your behavioural mindset than anything else. For example, it is often said that if you are young you should have most of your investible surplus invested in equities. But, if you do that without fully understanding the associated risks and the patience needed to achieve optimal returns, you may end up doing even worse than fixed deposits. That's because we, as humans, are primarily driven by fear and greed when it comes to investments. This leads us to buy equities when they are expensive (since there is a lot of hype) and sell them when they are cheap (since there is a lot of gloom), the exact opposite of what we need to b...