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India's first online weekly onpersonal finance

Ajay Shah's suggestions for combating fees and expenses of fund management

Ajay Shah has a post on Combating fees and expenses of fund management.

His suggestions:

• here is a small group of products that I am comfortable with: there are index funds (both open-ended funds and ETFs) and there is Quantum Mutual Fund. I like the Nifty and Nifty junior ETFs from Benchmark Mutual Fund, which are the lowest-cost index funds around.
• I would encourage customers to avoid the fund management products sold by insurance companies: Buy pure insurance products from insurance companies if you really need insurance, and avoid the bundling of fund management with insurance.
• In all cases, I would encourage the customer to avoid distributors, be very conscious about the grand total fees and expenses being inflicted on you, and pay as little as you possibly can to financial firms. Fund management is a rare field where paying more generally gives you lower quality products.
• Avoid all `New Fund Offerings' (NFOs); do not churn.
• Become a customer of the New Pension System, which is phenomenally low cost, when you get the opportunity. The NPS has no NFOs, no innovative product development, no distributors, just honest down-to-earth low cost fund management.

Go read the full post

India's first online weekly onpersonal finance

MyToday is live and kicking

I registered an account at MyToday which is a homegrown web apps from Netcore India. The content available is good and the website has a clean interface. I guess they need to work on the visual aspect of the site, even though it's fine with me.

I feel that MyToday also needs to have a strong editorial support staff as well as a interactive support mechanism to make a big impact. I'm comparing it with their Blogstreet initiative which held a lot of promise, but did not impress me (with the lack of support for my numerous emails!)

I presume Rajesh Jain wants to focus on content and does not believe so much on marketing. My 2 cents would be that Marketing does not mean just shameless promotion. It also means understanding the customers needs, fulfilling them and make customers delighted with the support functions.

I also want them to make a sms alert service for my "To do Today" list.

• MyToday has loads and loads of content for you. From news updates from around the world to local information about Weather, Movies, Emergency Numbers to all-time Classics, Books, Puzzles, TV timings and more. You'll have unrestrained access to all this content by just registering with MyToday. And registering is a simple two step process. Enter your phone number and password - and then confirm it by simply sending an SMS.
• I especially like the content in their "Library".
  
• Registering with MyToday ensures that you can use Bookmarks to store your favourite content. With Bookmarks, you can create your list of content that you can access any time you want. For example, if you want to check a recipe again, or want to revisit a poem that you loved - all you need to do is bookmark it and it will be available to you the next time you visit MyToday.
• To top it, registered users can create sms alerts for their own content too (Bloggers, take note!) For example, Atanu Dey is already on MyToday. You can follow him by sending a message START AtanuDey to 575758

Time to get the power of mobile working for you.

Trying out Zoho Creator: The best blog posts 2007

Looking back at 2007 at RanjanBlog.com

2007 has seen my toddler blog evolve and take shape. The blogger url was http://financexchange.blogspot.com and I titled the blog as a "Knowledge exchange on Finance". I did not like it for long and I tried various titles.

So my blog had preachy titles like "Take responsibility for your finances" or "Getting started is the key", cheesy ones like "Get rich or die tryin!" or "It doesn't require to be a genius to be rich"

Along the way I also named it as Ranjan's Weblog/blog on Business and Finance and the likes. I seem to have finally settled for the present title/subtitles, but who knows!

But I like it the way it is now. Ranjan's space: personal finance, infopreneurism, dotcom architecture and Me. While the blog evolved, I also learnt a lot on building a website and have dreams of becoming an infopreneur. The result is my site on personal finance, which is on the first page of google search results when you google "personal finance websites India"

It is satisfying to look back at 2007 when it comes to my web initiatives. A few blog posts that I recollect having fun in putting together are:

• Enjoy Blogging, or don't do it! was a list of answers that Amit Varma provided to my questions way back in January, 2007.
• In February, I did a newbie's preview/review of the Union Budget(Playing it safe) which helped me understand the budget for the first time.
• This asset allocation post was fun. (March, 07)
  
• My post for my son helped me come closer to him. (April,07)
• Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a destination (May,07)
  
• What was my Investment IQ (June,07)
• Impact of financial literacy on the Indian economy (July,07)
• India's first online weekly on personal finance in August, 07.
• Do your personal finance maths online in September, 07
• Does your agent use the information advantage against you? in October, 07.
• What are the different charges of ULIPs in November, 07.
• 40 today, Going on to be 25 in December, 07.

Thanks and keep the encouragement coming by your mail and subscriptions by email and RSS feeds. For my new year resolutions, you can check me out on Twitter too!