While purchasing my second flat, I took loan from Godrej Housing Finance (GHF) since I didn’t have lot of money. GHF provided me upto 94% of loan while regular bank won’t go beyond 80%.

Fast forward 2 years, government is reducing repo rate consistently. In past one year, repo rate has come down by 1.25%. But same hasn’t been the case with GHF loan. Its interest rate has come down just by 0.25% . My other bank loans (from HDFC and SBI) have reduced their interest rates by 1.25% and that too in the same month when repo rate announcement was made.

What happens to your ESOPs when company goes IPO? If you have Rs. 1cr ESOPs will you be crorepati overnight? On paper yes, but there are lots of twists and turns and patience is the key. Let’s traverse an imaginary IPO journey. Before we proceed, there are few technical terms that we need to be aware of:

• ESOPs: Employee Stock Option (notice the word option here, it is an option to buy a stock not actual stock)
• Vesting date: The date on which any stock option becomes exercisable
• Exercising period: The time window (typically 10 years from grant date) within which you must exercise the option, or they expire
• Exercise date: The date on which you exercise the option, i.e. you convert the stock option to a stock
• Exercise price: The price that you pay to convert stock option to stock. It is Rs. 1 in our company
• FMV: Fair market value is the stock price as evaluated by some investment company
• Perquisite: (FMV - Exercise price)
• Sale date: The date on which you sell the stock

Important note on holding period: Your holding period for capital gains tax starts from the EXERCISE date, not grant or vesting date. For tax purposes:

I had been eating outside or in office from past few months. Everything was going well but I started to feel few issues.

When food is free (like office dinner), I tend to eat more and then can’t sleep well at night. Eating daily outside, I started to burp a lot. The burps had foul smell. This didn’t feel right. So I decided to take control of what I eat.

In Sep 2023, I bought my Dzire car from Spinny. Car cost was around Rs. 5L. I thought of making a down payment of Rs. 1L and taking a loan of Rs. 4L. With the EMI the car would have costed me Rs 5.5L

I had savings of more than Rs 5L in FD. I thought instead of paying interest to bank, why not take loan from myself ? I broke the Rs 5L FD and started an RD of Rs 20k for 3 years.

Few Years ago, I used to invest in Share Market. Every morning, I used to open the app around 9am and start tracking the movements. I used to save Rs 10-12k to invest in market for that month. Depending on how the market is moving, I would buy few shares. When I bought some share and at end of day I earned even few rupees profit, it would make me happy. It was an achievement. Throughout the day I would fidget around the trading app checking if there has been any positive movement.

WFH days were over when we were called to office. I had got an extension of 6 months since we were expecting a child. In the meantime, I had to come to Bengaluru for office visits. During these visits, I checked about rents in Bengaluru. They had significantly shot up. Even a 1BHK would have been fine for me, but it did not come with car parking. So, I had to search for 2BHK. In a decent society it shot up to anywhere Rs 40k - Rs 50k.