What's already committed before you spend a rupee. EMIs, home loans, and the arithmetic of borrowing against a salary you have not yet earned.
An EMI is the one financial decision that is genuinely hard to reverse. Once it is signed, a fixed share of every future salary is spoken for before any of it reaches a savings goal — and because each individual EMI is affordable in isolation, they stack until the total is not.
These posts work the arithmetic that decides those calls: what share of take-home pay is already committed, what a loan actually costs once interest is counted against what the same money could have earned invested, and whether buying a flat beats renting one over twenty years. The numbers are run on Indian salaries, Indian interest rates and Indian tax treatment, because the answers change materially when they are not.
On a 20-year home loan, five years of EMIs clears just 11.9% of the principal. The arithmetic behind it, and the one instruction that changes it.
Read the numbers →Everyone assumes buying beats renting. Run the 20-year numbers on a ₹1 crore flat and see what renting and investing the difference actually does.
Read the numbers →40% of smartphones, two in three premium phones, and roughly 80% of cars in India are bought on EMI. Here's what that's actually costing you every month.
Read the numbers →Your SIP is up 11.7% this year. Your phone EMI charges 16%. Here's the comparison almost nobody runs — and the 7% rule that settles it.
Read the numbers →These posts support Automatic expense tracking in India — start there for the full picture.