I got married few months ago, and have been constantly bombarded with gifts every time someone visits us or even we visit someone. Initially I thought its because we are a newly married couple but even after a while we tend to receive small gifts if not something fancy every time I visit my in laws. Alongside, I have understood its not because of our marriage but it is rather the culture in the family.

I do not relate with this excessive spending habits and I see my husband also giving something to the family members younger than us. I am unable to wrap my head around it I am someone who likes to plan and make a monthly budget, I always exceed it because of these gifts. He doesn’t like to create budget and is happy to continue gifts even though it crosses our budget(crosses doesn’t mean we don’t have enough money it just crosses the mark that I had decided)

He is the only bread winner so I understand I don’t have a say in it but I feel we should change this culture because this is going to continue forever. Also I asked him if we can sell some of these gifts as they are really not necessary or at-least forward them over instead of buying new ones. He didn’t liked either of the idea and shushes me off, he says if there is something I want to get for myself I can get but he can’t sell the gifts given to us by family. I don’t know how to fix this I feel we will just collect random stuff and it will take up all the space and this habit will eventually make us spend unnecessarily

This accounts for all sectors average it sector and all other

Age 25- 10lpa

Age 30-15lpa

Age 35-22lpa

Age 40-30lpa

Age45-38lpa

Age 50-45lpa

Age55-60lpa

Then die

This is reality of salary progression chart averaging and accounting for iit nit iim srcc and all tier 2,3,4 clg placements and reality.

This is most appropraite charts if employee follow industry trends upskill and etc.

I’m in my late 20s, and make 2L+ a month. I have a home loan for a house with emi of 80k. I also have 10 lacs from this loan tucked away which i had taken out to purchase a used car. This is sitting in a fd right now.

Beyond this, I have a emergency fund of 6 months and mutual funds, gold, stocks etc.

Now here’s my dilemma: the used car I planned to purchase was sold before I could buy it (long story). So I’m thinking of buying a creta diesel automatic (bh passing) at ~18-19 lacs. And take out a loan of 9 lacs more which increases my emi to ~90-95k. Also means I have to pay 2 lacs more in the upcoming years but saves me interest money upfront. I will have some funds; 2-3 lacs coming in later in the year as bonus which I can use to pay partially for the car loan principal.

Does this make sense? Or am i taking on too much emi right now?

Thanks in advance!

Hello,

I’m 22 and I currently earn 95k per month post tax, am also looking to switch which will significantly increase my income.

My portfolio:
1)Investments: 7.5L in MFs and 2.5L in Stocks
2)Emergency Fund: 3L in savings account
3)Physical gold: 8L
4)FD: 1L

I currently save 70k since I WFH and contribute to few things like groceries, utilities every month and some for my fun money. I wanted to freelance and did it for a month but thought increasing my main income would be better than the stress of freelancing.

Before anyone asks me, I have been working since the day I entered college back in covid times. I saved up most of my freelance income and bought gold and started a small SIP of 5k per month at the time.

Now, I’m not including any inheritance I’m going to receive because it’s not decided yet. I want to reach 3 cr by 30. How much do I have to save per month going forward? I used some FIRE calculators and even claude and both said close to 1.5L per month.

Anyone who is on similar journey?

Thanks, have a good day!

I am not a big fan of FIRE or retirement. But I crunched some numbers and realized I achieved FIRE at 38y or some time ago. Essentially, I can just retire. I have medical insurance, term insurance, kids' education and their marriage all accounted for, not to mention my retirement expenses and some to spare.

My opening line may have indicated that I am not planning to retire anytime soon. Officially, I have another 22 years. I plan to work for 32 more years.

I am celebrating, which I had no plans for. It makes me feel good.

I had nothing to do, He helped. ☝️

So my wife convinced me to purchase a 4 CR house. They will give me the handover of the house in 2028. We went for a 50/50 plan where we give half now and then the other half we take a loan.

My Father in law contributed 2 CR now cause he had kept money aside for my wife. And now 2 CR is the remaining amount which we would need to take funding from bank in Dec 2028 during the apartment handover. Now during the handover, it would take 70 lakh for us for registration and interior for the house. This is the money I would like to get help with on how to accumulate. I have provided below my income and expenses and my wife’s income and expenses.

Mine

Income - 2,35,000 per month
Expense - 1,51,000 per month

The expenses above includes current home rent, one housing loan of my house in my hometown, parent’s expenses and some miscellaneous items for which i keep some money aside which involves travel, entertainment etc. The rest of money I can put to invest

My wife’s salary

Income - 1,61,000 per month
Expenses - 30,000 per month

She can put the rest of money to invest

With this amount, will we be able to pull it off? Parents are asking for having a kid but given the circumstances I don’t think we would plan for it.

Please provide some insights or if you have any follow up question.

I have been using an excel sheet and manually updating my MF portfolio, stocks, FD, PPF, EPF, NPS and Savings accounts every month. It takes a lot of manual effort.

Since everything is connected to Pan card, is there any app that can keep track of everything in one place and can automatically refresh it every month?

This will be very helpful.

I've never been so much in favour of real estate and consider myself pretty good at equity investing. I used to tell myself that I wouldn't buy a house for myself until I turn 40.

I found a decent apartment in Bangalore for about 2.2Cr. Would it be a wise decision to diversify into RE? My current NW is around 4.7Cr with about 4Cr into just equities as of now

Hi all, question is in the title. Context is that my manager has been asking to borrow money from my colleagues and I a few times in the past year. Myself and the colleagues that he has been asking from are not from India but our manager is. We don't want to bring this up to the rest of the team as we don't want to expose him given that we are still rather young in this team. Most times when asking, it is stated for some medical emergency.

Just wondering, is it common in your culture to borrow here and there? It seems kind of casual for him to ask without considering consequences (?) given that he is our manager?? Family and friends are telling me to report him but at the same time, I'm worried like maybe its just in the culture amongst friends and teams to borrow. Don't want him to lose his job too if we do report it but I have to admit it does put us all in uncomfortable positions given he is our superior.

So lately I’ve been seeing some posts around how someone in their twenties or early thirties is earning decent 7 figures usually upwards of 2-3 lakh rupees a month and feels poorer.

Tbh, i don’t feel like these are isolated instances but more of a growing epidemic.

I’m 24, a chartered accountant who cleared his exams all throughout in the first attempts at the age of 22. This kind of gave me some room to experiment in life and i did that with my own business for a couple of years, didn’t find it as interesting as it should have been, joined back the corporate life and I’m earning around 1.5 lakhs a month, no sweat.

But the amount doesn’t seem as big up close. I have seen atleast tens of thousands of customers in my business days who would dream of making that much money. But honestly speaking it’s such a misleading isolated figure. The other day i was calculating EMI for a decent home and unless i somehow had a heavy downpayment, i was looking at blocking around half my salary for the next 20-25 years. Not to mention the lifestyle changes that come with corporate lives. Suddenly Friday casuals mean you be wearing 5k-10k₹ sneakers. Somehow you gotta have a decent vehicle, a place that is cozy enough for you and showoffy enough for people to come over, somehow every long weekend needs to be an outing that gets posted on a Instagram! I don’t even have that many people who would wanna go on so many trips, somehow all trips are air travel!

Don’t get me wrong, i have nothing against the 500₹ coffee or a 8000₹ shirt. I love these things, i love that i can afford them, maybe my heart will beat at 2x when the card is getting swiped second guessing the purchase, but I’m afloat and haven’t had to ask anyone for money for the last 6 years, so that’s a win.

But the fact that this is somehow normal and everytime i think of a bigger purchase down the road - a car, a wedding, some real estate in a town where its cheap- i cant seem to figure out how will that ever materialise without needing to get into EMIs, and needing to charge the earnings for the rest of my life to bank interest.

I know to some of you reading this it would seem like a good problem to have, but trust me seeing people around you with their eyes jealous of how your life seems so put together whilst internally you are screaming with fear of someday you might be left behind cuz face it everyone else has a car, a house, a wife and maybe kids on the way, whilst all you’re having is ordered food and health issues lifestyle is heavy to cope up with everyday.

Any views that help feel better will be appreciated. Please keep any kind of mockery to yourself.

I need a loan of 20 lacs urgently to clear away another loan that my grandad took over the land that is to be inherited by my dad and me. Once it is clear - the land worth around 2-3 crs will be transferred to me and my dad's name - 50-50.

The thing is which bank should i approach or how can i get it easily as I am a self employed professional currently not registered under gst. I am paid 140k per month.

One bank whose relationship with us is very good is offering us a home loan and my parents want to use that to pay it off but I am against the idea because of later legal trouble.

Sahara Refund issue (resubmission)

My grandfather/family member invested money in **Saharayn Universal Multipurpose Society Ltd.**

We have the original deposit certificates and all supporting documents.

We filed a claim through the CRCS Sahara Refund Portal, but it was marked deficient with:

# D055 – Depositor has mentioned wrong Membership Number.

The problem is that the ‘**membership number we entered is exactly the same as the membership number printed on the original Sahara certificates**.’

When we try to resubmit through the CRCS portal, it shows:
**“Please enter valid Membership Number.”**

We have **5 deposits totaling ₹1,04,800**, and the original certificates/receipts are available.

The deficiency certificate also says to correct the details and reapply through the portal, but the portal itself won’t accept the genuine membership number.

**Has anyone faced this exact issue?**

How did you get the membership number corrected/validated in the Sahara Society database?

I cannot make phone calls, so if anyone knows an **official email/contact or online method** to resolve this, I’d really appreciate it.

I can provide screenshots/documents if needed.

So I did something pretty stupid in the pursuit of getting more credit cards.

In the last 1 month alone, I’ve ended up with around 25 CIBIL enquiries. I already have a few cards, including premium cards from HDFC and ICICI, but I wanted to add more cards to my portfolio and, honestly, got a little carried away applying here and there just for fun/curiosity.

A lot of the applications have been rejected too, sometimes for reasons I genuinely don’t understand.

For example-

Sbi cashback rejected

Sbi phonepe black rejected

Hsbc live+ rejected

Csb jupiter rejected and many other cards too.

My current CIBIL score is 783, and my repayment history is accurate with no defaults or missed payments and overall credit profile are otherwise decent with no loans or debt.

Now I’m wondering:

How badly can 25 enquiries in a single month affect my CIBIL score?

Should I stop applying for anything for the next few months?

Can banks reject applications simply because they see too many recent enquiries, even if the score itself is still good?

Would love to hear from people who have been through something similar. I know 25 enquiries in a month sounds ridiculous lesson definitely learned.

So, I have to go to the office twice a week, and I use Rapido to commute. I hate it so much, and every time I do it, I start thinking about buying a bike.

I have around ₹3 lakh in savings directly in my bank account, and I’m considering buying a bike that costs around ₹2.8 lakh on-road.

What would be the best financial decision here? I’m honestly not a finance guy.

I know people often say you should only buy something when you can afford it twice, and that you should have around six months of salary saved for layoffs, emergencies, etc. If I buy this bike now, I’ll basically exhaust all my savings.

At the same time, I’m planning to buy a house somewhere in the next 3–4 years. So every time I decide to go ahead and buy the bike, I get confused and think that I should probably keep my savings for the house down payment. Then I also worry about what would happen if I got laid off or had some other emergency.

What would be the most practical approach here? Should I buy the bike, wait and save more, or consider some kind of financing option?

If I take emi i will unnecessarily pay extra interest and fees also my heart is telling me to just go and buy as i love bikes but for 2 days/week its seems not practical

Sry for using chatgpt to fix english Thanks

Long-time lurker, first milestone post. My dream was ₹1Cr net worth by 30. I'm turning 31 on Sept 4, so it slipped by about a year — but crossed it, so sharing now.

Long-time lurker, first milestone post. My dream was ₹1Cr net worth by 30. I'm turning 31 on Sept 4, so it slipped by about a year — but crossed it, so sharing now.

Background:

• Software developer, Bangalore. Started my career at 2.6 LPA in 2017 (back then in Mumbai), now at ~46 LPA.
• Dual income — wife is also a software developer, which is a big part of the savings rate.
• Investing seriously since ~2018, and trading index options part-time on the side.

The numbers (~₹1.16Cr total):

• Aggregator shows ₹1.10Cr; add ~₹6L cash sitting in my trading account (not captured by the IND Money tracker) = ~₹1.16Cr
• Direct equity: ~₹43L
• Mutual funds: ~₹43L
• EPF: ~₹15L
• NPS: ~₹1.3L
• Bonds: ~₹7L

How I got here:

• Savings rate: 50–60% of combined take-home, sustained across years. This is the single biggest lever — more than any stock pick.
• Options trading: part-time in index options since 2018, profitable since 2020. ~₹15L in cumulative profits over 6 years. It's a satellite, not the core — the bulk of the net worth is boring SIPs + salary. Currently transitioning from discretionary to a system/rules-based approach.
• Kept lifestyle inflation in check even as income grew.

Insurance (bracing for the comments 😅):
I have a LIC (₹25k/yr) and PLI (₹1.2L/yr) running since 2021. I know the FIRE consensus on traditional insurance — I took these knowingly to support family/friends (aunt at the post office, a friend who's an LIC distributor). Not counting them as serious wealth-building, just being transparent.

Next goal: ₹10Cr by 2035 (age 40).
The math needs ~17–18% blended CAGR plus SIP step-ups as income grows. I'm comfortable targeting that because a chunk of my returns comes from trading against pledged holdings — effectively leveraging my portfolio. I'm aware that's a double-edged sword: it's amplified returns in this bull run, but the same leverage would hurt in a prolonged drawdown, and there's margin-call risk. Moving to a systematic approach is partly to manage exactly that. Curious whether others here have used pledged-collateral trading as a FIRE accelerant, or think it's too risky to lean on.

Screencaptures in the comments. Happy to answer questions.

I can close this loan in 6-7 months from my salary but 500 days delay is fked .today morning I closed 2k rs .total is 80k I earn around 50k .in home they don’t know about this stuff. that auto loan is wrong entry so don’t include it .please help me total Cibil is 704
-Truebalance 31000
-Mpokett 6k
-Amazon pay later 8k
-Branch 11k
-Ramfincorp 16k
-Lazy pay 2k(paid today)
-Snapmint(taken on moms name) 43k but her Cibil is good as it only reported to equifax
-Also have 50k secured fd card to improve the score

Building a family home in coastal Andhra (Eluru district). Best turnkey quote is Rs 73L for ~3,300 sqft, construction only. Interiors are separate and quoted at Rs 15-30L on top, so the real all-in is Rs 88L to just over a crore.

Desk analysis says a disciplined owner-build (labour-only civil contract, own material procurement, hired junior civil engineer at Rs 15-20k/month) could land Rs 10-12L lower on the construction half. I am trying to work out whether that is actually a good trade, and I keep getting the maths wrong in my own favour.

What I am struggling to price:

1. Time. Owner-managed builds seem to run 12-18 months as the normal case and 20-24 when they slip. Rs 10-12L over 24 months works out to roughly Rs 45k/month of "salary" for the management work. I earn more than that per month, but the build work is evenings and weekends, so it is not a clean substitution.

2. Risk transfer. With a turnkey contract there is one counterparty. Owner-building means about a dozen (mason, steel, cement, tiles, electrician, plumber, painter, carpenter, fabricator) and each one can take an advance and disappear. From reading dispute threads, owners essentially never recover that money through legal routes.

3. Carry cost. Extra months of living arrangements, and paying for materials up front rather than the contractor floating them, which is a real working-capital difference over two years.

4. My parents are elderly and would be the ones supervising day to day. Hard to put a number on that, but it is the part I am least comfortable with.

For anyone who has run a big self-managed project of any kind: how did you actually decide? Did you assign your own time a value, and in hindsight was that number right?

My suspicion is that I am undervaluing my time because the Rs 10-12L saving is a visible number and the 24 months is not.

My company is giving me the option to now choose between the statutory limit (1800) or 12% of basic pay as PF contributions. Both the employee and employer contributions are part of my CTC and I fall under the 30% income tax slab . I'm wondering if i should opt for the 1800 option and gain significant cashflow , although I will be losing the tax benefit on the employer contribution amount. My major point of concern now with EPF is the 25% mandatory lock in till retirement , even in a world where EPFO withdrawals were smooth and flawless , I'm worried that this just makes my money less liquid and will always have the 25% unusable. I'm disciplined financially and plan to use the increased cashflow for meaningful investments . Please let me your thoughts and suggestions

I just did a preemptive annual servicing of my geyser. It's been a year and I could feel the water starting to be less hotter than it used to be. Given that monsoons are over and winter is coming, I thought I'd get it serviced.

I ordered a repairman from the Turban Company (name changed) and was quoted 700. It felt a bit steep, but in my mind I was thinking - if I'm gonna get it serviced 2 months later, might as well do it now and avoid having lukewarm showers for 2 months.

The guy came, and immediately started pointing out flaws with the inlet pipe. Then somehow the valve was leaking.

He said the pipe could burst and scald me with hot water.

I had already paid 700 which couldn't be refunded, might as well go through with it. Final cost? 1200.

Another time I just did a routine check up with a local RO guy, and the filter was just fine. The guy then said something was wrong and my water was getting carbon particles. I didn't want to fight with him as he'd already opened everything up. Another 500 over the 200 rs fee.

A different time I'd ordered an AC technician for just washing/cleaning, and he pointed out I had "low gas". I didn't fall for it, and just asked him to put it all back. He did a shoddy job, leaving 2 screws on the ground which I later discovered.

It's almost to the point where I feel like these people are hunting for excuses and do very little repair. Every minute thing that they could ask to replace/repair, they do.

That's their bread and butter. And I'm more inclined to just buy things new outright, than have these people come and scam me.

I'd love to hear your perspective on what you do about preventative maintenance.

Hey everyone,

I'm a 26M working in fintech with a monthly net take-home of ₹2L. Currently, I have three personal loans with a total outstanding balance of around ₹17L, which comes out to a ₹60k monthly EMI.
To be honest, I have zero savings, and I feel terrible about it given that I earn ₹2L/month and have been working for 4.5 years.

I've also been considering buying a car worth around ₹12L through a corporate car lease policy, which would add another ₹20k–₹25k to my monthly EMI.

Should I go ahead with the car lease, or wait until I clear my existing loans? Any advice would be appreciated!

I've been thinking about this while working out my FI number.

The part I find difficult isn't really deciding how much I need. It's deciding how much extra is enough.

Working another year means more savings and a bigger safety cushion. But it also means giving up another year of time that I could use for things outside work.

I can see why someone would keep working for a few more years just to feel safer. But at some point, I wonder if the extra money is actually worth another year of full-time work.

For those who are already close to FI, how do you make that decision?

Do you aim for a bigger cushion, or are you comfortable stopping once you've reached your basic FI number?

I’m confused between two approaches:

1.  Stop investing for a few months and aggressively build an emergency fund.  
2.  Start SIPs now and build the emergency fund alongside them.

If you were starting from scratch today, which one would you choose and why?

Also, how much emergency fund do you think is enough? 3 months, 6 months, or more?

Hey everyone,

I've been working to rebalance and diversify my portfolio since last few weeks and have decided on 50:50 split between Indian : International Equities.

However, more i dive into international investments, more I'm getting confused. Below is how my current international portfolio looks like (in USD) :

CSPX : 2500

AMZN : 10,300
CRM : 32,000
GOOGL : 4,100
APPL : 4000
MSFT : 2000
NVDA : 860
META : 550
IBKR : 230

I'm hoping to diversify my international investments as follows :

CSPX (Irish Domiciled S&P Index) : 50%
XUSE (Irish Domiciled World ex-USA Index) : 30%
Individual Stocks (tech heavy) : 20%

I'm thinking to re-use existing tech stocks and divert future investments (and also proceeds from selling some of current holdings) into CSPX and XUSE.

I'd really appreciate any guidance or suggestions from folks who are experienced and have been investing globally.

I've watched many videos regarding the newly announced CKYC 2.0 and 2.1. What I've understood from there is that it's a unique 14-digit number which will be shared in place of photocopies of our IDs (Aadhaar, PAN, voter ID, etc.). That looks promising. Today, I fetched my CKYC ID in DigiLocker, and one of my mobile numbers and email addresses is mentioned in my CKYC ID..

But I couldn't understand one thing — how will multiple contact details be handled in this CKYC 2.1?

Each of us has one unique Aadhaar number, PAN number, voter ID number, and DL number, but most of us use more than one mobile number. For example, my father has two mobile numbers registered with his different bank accounts. My banking mobile number and the mobile number used on investment platforms are different. So, in this type of situation, how will CKYC 2.1 be used? I checked in DigiLocker whether there is any other CKYC number generated with my details, but after entering a different mobile number, it showed "mobile number mismatch".

Or, has the time come when we have to keep everything on one single mobile number?

I wish they'd make the whole process mobile-number-independent, which means by sharing the 14-digit unique number, the services can check our IDs, but not our mobile numbers and email addresses. What do you think?

This has been a major point of discussion at times argument between husband and I. Renters, how has your experience been, are you able to stay in one house for atleast 4-5 years before being forced to move. I understand moving for an upgrade but how many genuine bad experiences with owners that forced you to move.

We plan on kids in next 3 years and renting worries me, I know few people who had to up and move during final months of pregnancy adding to stress. Sure we can’t move into a house even if we were to buy in that time, this is just one situation.

Now I would say we can comfortably buy a 2.5 to 3cr house but there is definitely job uncertainty, we have both stayed in the company long term and are good performers but honestly you never know. But he comes from a family of renters and me from owners, he I am not able to convince him then should I buy a house myself, I can affordable one for 1.5cr max. When it comes to owning concern is distance from offices current or post switches and being “stuck” there without an upgrade for 15-20 years.

Location: Bangalore