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Guides on EMIs, SIPs, take-home salary, brokerage charges and retirement in India — written to sit next to Finaura’s calculators, without pretending the calculators are advice. Written by the Finaura Team. No login.
An EMI is one number on your statement and two jobs inside it. This guide explains principal, reducing-balance interest and why a smaller instalment can cost more over the life of the loan.
Thirteen instalments instead of twelve is not a thirteenth month of interest. It is an extra principal payment. Here is why that shortens the loan and what it does not guarantee.
A SIP is how you invest money you will earn later. A lump sum is how you invest money you already have. Treating them as rival products hides that difference.
A step-up SIP is a SIP whose instalment rises on a schedule. The extra growth comes from extra contributions, not from a special compounding trick.
There is no single percentage that fits every household. There is a method: today’s expenses, inflation, working years, years in retirement, and two return assumptions — all of which can be wrong.
Inflation is the reason a comfortable monthly expense today is not the number you should fund at retirement. Small rate differences become large corpus differences over decades.
Cost-to-company is an employer’s cost. Take-home is a bank credit. Gross sits in between. Mixing the three is how offer letters get misread.
Brokerage is one line on a contract note. STT, exchange charges, GST, SEBI fees and stamp duty are the rest. Delivery and intraday do not share the same stack.
Prepaying a loan earns a return equal to the interest you no longer pay. Investing might earn more, or less, and with different tax and risk. This is a comparison method, not a verdict.
Compounding is interest on interest — or returns on previous returns. Time and the rate you assume do most of the work. Markets do not compound in a straight line.
Longer explainers published earlier still live on the blog. They are not copies of these guides.
How the calculators treat rates and tax years is on the methodology page.