Category: Announcements

Shiv and I have been working with some paid clients during the last few months, and have been experimenting with various type of services, and we are now ready to announce this on the blog, and reach out to a wider audience.

There are two services that we are going to offer, and I’m going to talk about each of them in this post.

Comprehensive Financial Planning

Service

The first type of service is full blown financial planning, and we have developed a five step process for this. We conduct a weekly call and follow that up with a report at the end of each week.

You can see what each step of the process entails in the table below.

Each of the steps above lead into the next step, and finally helps prepare the comprehensive plan.

Fee

We will charge a fee of Rs. 15,000 for this service, which needs to be paid before we start the engagement.

Money Back Guarantee

We offer a no questions asked, money back guarantee that you can invoke at any time during the process and extends till 5 days after you receive the comprehensive financial plan.

There is no trick or hidden clause or disclaimers associated with this guarantee. We feel that 15,000 is not a small amount of money and if anyone feels that it has not been wisely spent, and they haven’t got their money’s worth, they should have it back. The loss in time and effort will be ours, and we will not ask you any questions or try to convince you of the value of the service. If the value wasn’t apparent enough to you during the process, then you needn’t pay for it.

One Time Consulting

Service

There are often circumstances that need you to answer a question which requires some financial expertise. For example, you get a lump-sum, and need to know the best way to invest it to generate a monthly income, or you have your portfolio assessed, and need recommendation on what to do next. This type of analysis needs a couple of hours, and if you send your question to us, we’ll let you know if we can do this or not. We will have a call with you, and send out a written report here for this as well.

Fee

We will charge a fee of Rs. 2,000 for this service, which needs to be paid before we start the engagement.

Money Back Guarantee

The guarantee that we offer on the full blown consulting is applicable here as well, if you think your money wasn’t well spent, we will return it to you without any questions

How will this affect the blog?

Both of us plan to write the way we were writing before, and we don’t plan to change the nature or frequency of our posts because of this announcement. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or if you want to keep it private, please send me an email.

 

I am not doing any new year resolutions this year, but I have spent the past few days reflecting on how the year has gone by and some things that have worked well for me in the past year that I’d like to continue.

These are very simple things that a lot of you will already be doing but if you aren’t then they are definitely worth a try.

1. Build alliances with like minded people: Unfortunately the world of Indian personal finance is littered with problems, and dishonest people is one of the biggest problems it has.

It is very rare to find people making an honest living in this environment, and even when you find them it is quite hard to forge alliances with them. That’s why for a large part of OneMint’s existence it has been more or less a one man show. Somewhere along the way Shiv discovered the blog, and I got to know him professionally, and later personally. This is the luckiest thing that has happened to OneMint. Both of us have a common vision about personal finance, and regular readers should know all too well how detail oriented and honest he is. These are qualities that I deeply cherish and are rare in today’s environment.  Shiv and I have been working together for quite some time now and if not for him, I would have probably shut OneMint by now.

I realize how valuable he has been for the blog, and after meeting him I’ve been actively seeking like minded people in other areas of work as well, and try to find common grounds to work together and grow together. Finding people who share your vision and working with them instead of working in silos is one of the key things I want to continue to do in 2014.

2. Take time off: I think one of the main reasons for thinking about shutting down OneMint was that I was just burned out. For the last 5 years or so I have worked non stop on weekends and holidays, and I used to think that if you do something you enjoy you don’t get burned out, but that hasn’t been true for me. Somewhere in the last year, I got so fatigued that I just gave up on blogging. If it wasn’t for Shiv’s posts, the traffic would have died and OneMint would have died a slow death.

Doing things that you do for their own sake is what is truly a fun activity and if you don’t build in fun breaks in your routine, you won’t be able to sustain anything for the long run. I have started slotting in some time for recreational reading, TV, Chess, movies etc. all things that have no purpose other than fun to make me more productive in the rest of my time. I had come to this realization on my own, but reading The Power of Full Engagement made me grasp this concept much better.

3.Build a habit: I read Leo Babuta’s post on forming habits sometime this year, and at about that time I was thinking of what I could do to get physically more active.

Although it sounds pretty ridiculous, I took his advice and started off with five push-ups every day. How ridiculous is that, right? But it actually does work. If you want to build a habit, start with something exceedingly small, and as you get into a routine that habit will forge and you will be doing a lot more than you initially thought you would. I’ve been going to the gym quite frequently now, and those five push-ups have transformed into a full blown 60 minute workout.

4. Volunteer: I wanted to start volunteering my time this year, and I wanted to do something in the area of children and education, but as I explored options and spoke with people I realized it isn’t very straightforward to get volunteer work in this area.

I expanded my search and found that one of the things I could practically do was walk dogs at a local no kill shelter. It is just 15 minutes drive, and all you have to do is go there and walk the dogs that are there so they don’t stay locked inside their pen throughout the day and get some exercise and a chance to do their business.

In the beginning it didn’t seem like much, you just walk dogs for two hours a day every week, anyone can do that, and it doesn’t seem to be very meaningful, but we went there anyway. But as you do this regularly, you get a sense of the bigger picture, and how your small part in it allows the whole system to work. You’re there volunteering your time, so a dog gets a chance to stay there and not be killed due to lack of resources at the government shelter. I heard of a story of a family where the dad lost his job, had to give away their pet, and that pet was put down due to lack of resources. Their grief was compounded many times, and it is then that I understood that every small bit actually helps.

Every small bit helps, and if you are interested but haven’t found something that seems significant enough, just start with something, anything at all, it does mean something to someone and it will be better than doing nothing at all.

5. Re-read books: I read a lot but I never read the same book again, and I was definitely missing out because of this, I changed this habit a few months ago.

Re-reading helps reinforce good ideas that you picked up the first time around, and you often come across new ideas as well. This is a practice I would definitely continue in the new year as well.

I want to wish all of you a very happy new year, and hope that the new year brings you much wealth and prosperity!

One of my favorite poems of all time is ‘Where The Mind is Without Fear’ by Rabindranath Tagore, and it is only natural that I thought of it today as India celebrates its 67th Independence Day.

Unfortunately, it failed to bring a smile to me as it usually does. First, please spend a minute to read this beautiful poem.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

The country has not awaken in a heaven of freedom, and it isn’t getting there any time soon. I haven’t ever felt this despondent at the state of Indian affairs, and it is indeed a big reason why I haven’t posted here in a while.

Is there much purpose of an investing blog in an environment like this? If you can barely afford onions, what hope is there to save for retirement?

It is true that when things are going so depressingly wrong, it is hard to imagine they can ever change. During the great recession of 2008, it felt like the global economy will collapse and I certainly didn’t hear anyone predicting Dow making new highs in 2013 even a year ago.

With that in mind, I did buy into Indian equity last week. All our problems are self inflicted, which is sad, but it is also good because we have the power to solve them. We are not solving them now, but I do believe something somewhere will change that will turn things around. With that hope, I wish everyone a happy Independence day.

 

Long time readers will remember that there was a lot of problem with OneMint going down a few months ago. I had upgraded to a much better server and the problems had stopped. However, the problem resurfaced, and I got completely exasperated. I’ve changed hosts now, and moved to Synthesis Webhosting. So far it is a lot cheaper, and the site is faster as well, but fingers crossed!

In moving the site something happened and email delivery stopped. It was only last Sunday when Bemoneyaware helpfully told me to validate the feed that I found the error. Fixing that was how the email delivery got restored and a big thank you to Bemoneyaware for their help.

The large majority of people don’t realize that I was still writing while the email feed stopped working, so I’m using this post to announce that the email delivery is working along with links to the posts that never went out as emails.

Which countries does India import its oil from?

Why NRIs shouldn’t rejoice the Rupee fall?

Short term measures to stop Rupee slide won’t work

How to fill Excel ITR Form?

Last week I posted some stats about OneMint, and how I was disappointed by the fall in traffic witnessed in the last year. It was amazing to see so many comments and emails on that post, and I thank all of you for your support.

I’ve been thinking about all the feedback I got, and I have put together a list of 5 items that I want to do in the future based on it.  

1. Expand the scope of topics: Pattu posted the first comment on that post and it was about boredom – he was quite close to what I’ve been feeling over the past year or so and the reason for that is that almost all the content is now driven by what others have requested as opposed to the earlier years when I was writing about things that I stumbled upon and wanted to learn more on.

I need to get that mix going again and write about some non finance related topics that interest me and that I feel might be of interest to others. I think some articles explaining current events will be useful here too. For example, RBI has recently given a nod to create the country’s first mortgage guarantee company – why are they doing this? What does this mean for people, and how has other country’s experience with this been. This could also be lighter things like how does TIME decide that Aamir Khan or P. Chidambaram are influential enough to be in their list?

2. Answer comments within a day: No one mentioned this specifically, but I feel bad whenever it takes me more than a day to reply to a comment, and I’m going to try and respond to each and every comment within 24 hours. I get a fair bit of email as well and while I try to answer each and every email it is really hard to keep track of it. It’s a lot better to post a comment if you need a reply, and please don’t mind following up if I don’t respond to your email within a couple of days.

3. Add depth to the posts: There was criticism about posts being simple, and I’m going to try and address that by adding more content about difficult topics, and writing in more detail about simpler ones.

4.  Maintain posting frequency: With all that I’ve got going – 6 posts in a week is the most I can manage, and I’m going to try and stick to that for the rest of the year.

5. Covering more investment products: Unfortunately, there aren’t many good products and many times I look over a name and pass writing about it because it doesn’t look interesting enough. I got some feedback on covering more investment products even if they aren’t good because even that is meaningful information for people who don’t know about them.

I’m really grateful for all your feedback last week. It was quite unexpected, and has really energized me to focus on OneMint and try to grow it once again.

Nothing is as motivating as knowing that people find value in what you are doing, and I’m really glad that so many of you feel that way.

I share OneMint numbers with you from time to time, and usually I do that when the blog hits a milestone or some other small achievement like that.

However, today I’m going to share stats of perhaps the worst quarter OneMint has ever had. I track some numbers on OneMint quarterly, and since this is a financial blog, the last quarter of every financial year is usually the best as far as traffic is concerned.

OneMint was very close to hitting one million pageviews per quarter in 2012, and I was fairly confident that the one million a quarter mark will be hit in Q1 2013. However, this is what happened:

Â	 2013 Jan – Mar	Growth / Decline (’12 Jan – Mar)
Pageviews	447,520	-53.67%
Unique Visitors	287,693	-41.78%
Visits	336,772	-43.34%
Pages / Visit	1.42	-12.88%
Avg Time on Site	00:1:21	-17.35%
Bounce Rate	78.93%	17.44%
New Visits	82.11%	3.48%

As you can well imagine, I’m very disappointed with these numbers, and when a friend casually remarked that by next year OneMint won’t even be in existence, I got a small shock and thought that I should introspect and spend some time on why OneMint has done so badly in recent times.

I hope that writing this will also help other bloggers avoid some mistakes that I have committed.

With that in mind, here is what I think I did wrong that has led to OneMint’s recent decline.

1. Answered comments late: I have not been answering comments as regularly as I used to and this has definitely led to a decline in traffic. People don’t post as often, and the ones who were likely to post follow ups don’t do it when the comments are old, so not answering comments in a timely fashion has led to decline.

2. Did not post frequently enough: I don’t know of an easy way to calculate this but I’m pretty sure that I haven’t posted as much in 2012 as I did in 2011, and that definitely leads to decline in traffic – every new article results in traffic so it is natural that if you post less frequently your traffic will go down as well.

3. Did not strategize posts: Suggest a Topic has been a great page because of the discussion it generates but I usually don’t think about how popular that question is likely to be. Not every question interests a large segment of readers and many times I think that I haven’t used my time to the most optimal possible. Sometimes I write posts which are very narrow in scope and that takes away from writing about other things that are of interest to a wider audience and that is definitely a cause for lower traffic.

4. Did not update old posts: The main source of traffic for OneMint is Google Search, and older posts usually send more traffic. In the past I have updated older posts with more current data so that the posts still remain relevant and don’t lose their search engine rankings, but in the last year I haven’t been updating posts as regularly and as a result they are dropping out of search engine rankings, and losing their traffic.

5. Did not write difficult posts: Although I hate to admit it, I’ve been prone to write about topics that I already know about and that’s usually not good for traffic. You want to write about things that are difficult and explain them so that posts get shared, and do well in search rankings, writing easy stuff is easy but won’t generate traffic long term.

I can go on and on but I want to stop here, and hear from you on what you think might have been the reason for OneMint’s decline, and for those of you who also have blogs, I hope that you don’t commit the same mistakes that I have!

From looking at comments and email exchanges of regular readers, I’ve always had a feeling that the ratio of women to men reading OneMint is higher when compared to other blogs. I don’t have any stats to prove this, and I don’t know if this is just perception or reality, but it certainly did surprise me when I read an older Jago Investor survey that said only 10% of their readers were women.

I bring this up because when I saw a post at FundsIndia which said that they will select 5 lucky women and give them a 1 gram gold coin if they open their Funds India account today, I felt that this will be useful information for readers here.

So, if you are interested in opening an account there, today is a good day. You can click here to find out more about this.

I want to add that if you didn’t want to open an account anyway then just this incentive is not big enough to do so as this will add complexity to your financial life even if it doesn’t cost you anything in terms of money.

Disclosure: FundsIndia is an advertiser here, but they didn’t ask me to write about this thing. 

I’m delighted to announce the CIBIL contest winners today. This contest had the most participants that we’ve ever had, and it’s great to see that there is so much awareness among readers about the need and use of a credit score.

CIBIL had sent me the name of these three winners earlier today, and they haven’t been informed of it yet. I will send the email addresses of the readers to CIBIL and they will contact you directly for the next steps. If for any reason you need to contact me about this then you can leave a comment or use the Contact form to send a direct email.

CIBIL Winners

Here are the three winners:

1. Jayachandran
2. Kapil Dev Tejwani
3. Balamurugan Balasubramanian 

Congratulations to all three of you and thanks to everyone else for participating.

We used to have a forum here about a year ago and then I got rid of it because of incessant spam which got totally out of control. A lot of you have asked for the forum since then and we have put it back live again. The link can be found on the top of the page, or you can just click here.

Your old user ids and passwords should work but if you don’t remember them then you can always set up a new password. The format is exactly the same as last time, and even the old threads are visible.

There are the following seven categories that you can choose from:

1. Debt
2. Gold, silver and other commodities
3. Insurance
4. Mutual Funds
5. Shares
6. Taxation
7. General / Others

If you have any feedback please leave a comment here.

Thank you for participating in the CIBIL contest which is now over. I have created this list of participants that I will give CIBIL and they will declare the winner shortly.

Please go through it and let me know if you posted a comment and I missed you. If you simply emailed me then that was not a valid way of participating and I can’t add your name now, so only post a comment if you did that earlier.

All the best!

S.No.	Name	Source
1	vikrant	First Blog Post
2	Santha Kumar Ramaiyan	First Blog Post
3	Parijat	First Blog Post
4	Vaibhav Bajpai	First Blog Post
5	Rahul Kumar	First Blog Post
6	Amit Tamhankar	First Blog Post
7	Dheeraj	First Blog Post
8	Rakesh	First Blog Post
9	Kunal	First Blog Post
10	Vinodh Kumar	First Blog Post
11	Sriharsha K V	First Blog Post
12	bluecrabs	First Blog Post
13	rohan doshi	First Blog Post
14	Satbir Singh	First Blog Post
15	Vishal Ramaswamy	First Blog Post
16	rahul chandalia	First Blog Post
17	siddhant	First Blog Post
18	Vivek	First Blog Post
19	Ravi	First Blog Post
20	Venkatesan S	First Blog Post
21	Sunder	First Blog Post
22	satbir	First Blog Post
23	Vishnu Kumar	First Blog Post
24	Mayank Shah	First Blog Post
25	Ravi	First Blog Post
26	Kunal	First Blog Post
27	Shailesh Soni	First Blog Post
28	Dipankar	First Blog Post
29	Ashwin	First Blog Post
30	Rajat	First Blog Post
31	Ams	First Blog Post
32	Divya	First Blog Post
33	Anurag Garg	First Blog Post
34	Sumeet Gupta	First Blog Post
35	ashish maskara	First Blog Post
36	Gavisha	First Blog Post
37	Viral	First Blog Post
38	K VENU	First Blog Post
39	Gaurav Sharma	First Blog Post
40	Paul	First Blog Post
41	Kirti	First Blog Post
42	Jayachandran	First Blog Post
43	Anantha krishna T	First Blog Post
44	Kunal	First Blog Post
45	PP	First Blog Post
46	Saurabh	First Blog Post
47	Rahul Sharma	First Blog Post
48	Vinay	First Blog Post
49	Alok	First Blog Post
50	Piyush	First Blog Post
51	Vivek	First Blog Post
52	Saurabh	First Blog Post
53	shekhar Lohumi	First Blog Post
54	naresh	First Blog Post
55	Melwin FALCAO	First Blog Post
56	Sachin	First Blog Post
57	Vaibhav Bajpai	First Blog Post
58	Madhur	First Blog Post
59	Ankit K	First Blog Post
60	Murugan	First Blog Post
61	Ashok v	First Blog Post
62	Jatin	First Blog Post
63	Satish	First Blog Post
64	sivakumar R	First Blog Post
65	psnaidu	First Blog Post
66	Abhishek Nair	First Blog Post
67	Amit Chadha	First Blog Post
68	soumya	First Blog Post
69	Uma	First Blog Post
70	Rakesh	First Blog Post
71	M Nair	First Blog Post
72	J.P.Taneja	First Blog Post
73	Sanchit Arora	First Blog Post
74	Ashish Balachandran	First Blog Post
75	Narasimha Gupta	First Blog Post
76	Pavithran	First Blog Post
77	Balaji Chegu	First Blog Post
78	Yuvarajan	First Blog Post
79	Sricharan	First Blog Post
80	Vish	First Blog Post
81	Ravi Gupta	First Blog Post
82	sham	First Blog Post
83	Vikash Jain	First Blog Post
84	Simhadri	First Blog Post
85	Vignat Vora	First Blog Post
86	pk	First Blog Post
87	Mahesh I	Second Blog Post
88	Vijayakumar S	Second Blog Post
89	surya	Second Blog Post
90	sairam	Second Blog Post
91	Karthik	Second Blog Post
92	Prakash	Second Blog Post
93	Sandeep	Second Blog Post
94	Omprakash	Second Blog Post
95	Jatin Visaria	Second Blog Post
96	r January 14, 2013 at 3:58 pm [edit]	Second Blog Post
97	Rambabu	Second Blog Post
98	Kapil Dev Tejwani	Second Blog Post
99	harineem	Second Blog Post
100	Vilas	Second Blog Post
101	arun	Second Blog Post
102	Rohit Sharma	FB Wall
103	Kaustuv Sengupta	FB Wall
104	Ramkishan Sonthalia	FB Wall
105	Kaushal Turakhiya	FB Wall
106	Anjani Singh	FB Wall
107	Jaideep Bhide	FB Wall
108	Mohammad Johar	FB Wall
109	Abhijeet Sinha	FB Wall
110	Sandeep Dhawan	FB Wall
111	Padmanabhan Renganathan	FB Wall
112	Balamurugan Balasubramanian	FB Wall
113	Sanjeev Kumar	FB Wall
114	Nagaraj Sharrma	FB Wall
115	Preetam Shetty	FB Wall
116	Gopal Ashish Sharma	FB Wall
117	Mohsin Rafik Shaikh	FB Wall
118	Anjali Kuttikar	FB Wall
119	Deepak Sanghi	FB Wall
120	Jaswinder Singh	FB Wall
121	Venkatasamy Vvs	FB Wall
122	Chintan Desai	FB Wall
123	Pranjal Sarma	FB Wall
124	Sugar Ray	FB Wall
125	Niranjan Aroskar	FB Wall
126	Vinayak Gadkari	FB Wall
127	Parag Joshi	FB Wall
128	Kamal Kothari	FB Wall
129	Nikhil Gupta	FB First Post
130	Siddharth Roy	FB First Post
131	Mohit Agrawal	FB First Post
132	Binny Mathew	FB First Post
133	Pratik Parekh	FB First Post
134	Siddharth Roy	FB First Post
135	Suraj Shetty	FB First Post
136	Sureshkumar Nallathambi	FB First Post
137	Ravikiran Chakka	FB First Post
138	Harshad Korde	FB First Post
139	Sneha Dixit Sharma	FB First Post
140	Crosswords Guy	FB First Post
141	Piyush Khanwalkar	FB First Post
142	Shivaji Dhuri	FB First Post
143	Monty Shah	FB First Post
144	Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal	FB First Post
145	Goutam Lenka	FB First Post
146	Yuvarajan Udayasankaran	FB First Post
147	Raj Bose	FB Second Post
148	Nitin Parmar	FB Second Post
149	Arun Rathi	FB Second Post
150	Satish Cool	FB Second Post
151	Kaushal Turakhiya	FB Second Post
152	Saurabh Karandikar	FB Second Post
153	Ramkishan Sonthalia	FB Second Post
154	Imtiaz Ahmed Siddiqui	FB Second Post