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Mutual Funds, Sahi Hai!

We have been looking at Credit Cards for some weeks now. Let’s check another very important tool for your financial independence - Mutual Funds. They give you the growth of the equity market, but do not require you to have the full know-how of how equity markets work or the troubles of reading through the balance sheets of n-number of listed firms. Now there are a couple of ways to go about it. One, you check the most popular and talked about funds on social media and start buying them, or you can actually understand how these work and create a balanced portfolio of funds for yourself that complement each other. This article would be for the folks interested in the second approach. So if you fall in the first category, who believe in investing the most talked about funds, you can probably ignore the later part of this discussion. Mutual Funds are not something that we can cover up in a single article or discussion. I will be trying to create a series of such articles where we discuss a...
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Singapore Under INR 100K

Till now we have spoken a lot about free travel and stay using credit card points, but never deep dived into it. So I thought why not explain it with my own example which I had previously mentioned here .  Our journey began with acquiring a once amazing card called - Axis Magnus back in 2022 . Though the card is only a shadow of its previous glorious self, I have linked the features and benefits page for your information. One of the market leading features of this was, that on a monthly spend of INR 100k, you would get 25k Edge Reward Points. Magnus being a Super Premium card, would also elevate the cardholder to HNI status with Axis bank. This meant that the transfer ratio of edge reward points jumped up to a crazy ratio of 5:4 In 2023, I also had a wedding of a cousin in Pula, Croatia. So there were quite a lot of expenses that I could foresee. This along with the rent payments and other monthly expenses for both mine and my wife’s home, including a gold scheme that was running,...

A Guide on Travel Credit Cards

Post Diwali, the temperatures drop and the country and most of the other easily accessible countries from India are ripe for tourism. That is why I thought I should talk a bit about this insanely popular credit card category available to us. T ravel credit cards are possibly the most loved type of credit cards that are out there. And that is because, most people nowadays, especially with the growing social media, love to travel. And these cards help you just a notch in satiating your wanderlust. How? Well that's the purpose of this article today! I will touch base on the host of benefits that most travel cards provide, how you can try to make the most of them and wrap it up by giving a few suggested cards from the myriad of choices available! So let's jump right in! A travel credit card can help the cardholders by substantially saving upfront on travel bookings by giving direct discounts on flight/railway tickets and also on hotel stays. Apart from this, they also come as co-br...

Credit Cards - Types & Categories

  In this edition, let's talk about the different types of credit cards that are available in the Indian market. Just a note here, I will be discussing the cards based on the basic Indian context. There are cards such as Chase, Charles Schwab and Amex US which I will not be covering since they are not for everyone. We will be dividing the whole universe into 2, first we will see the cards based on their Annual Maintenance charges(AMC), and next based on their use cases.  So let’s begin with AMC based categorization - Entry level cards : These cards, as the name suggests, are your entry into the world of credit cards. The best part with them is that you don’t have to put a lot of thought into how to use them or how to get any benefits from them. They are simply to give you a small credit line without any further benefit in using them. Key Features :  Low or no AMC Very low fee waiver limit Low Credit Limit (usually within INR 1 lac) Very Straight forward Terms & Condit...

Credit Card Benefits - A Brief

So, on a quaint Sunday evening, while sipping from the proverbial tea cup, I sat to write the latest article for this new blog that I have started. Thought of a few things that I should write on, and the one thing that I think will resonate most for now with majority of the readers is the general benefits of using a credit card as a financial tool. I would like to mention it again, credit cards are a financial tool and not just a means of paying for something when you do not have money handy. This way of thinking is what will eventually lead you towards financial freedom as well, though I do not want to go towards that so early in our discussions. I will try to keep most of the articles on this blog crisp and concise, in line with the ever decreasing attention span of our populace! So let's get on with it. As discussed previously, most of the regular folks tend to keep a safe distance from credit cards. That is majorly because of a number of misconceptions around it and the genera...

Welcome to The Couch!

  Starting this new blog to discuss different credit cards and how to maximize their rewards ethically . I know there are a lot of forums for this, but my purpose of starting this is to document my learnings about credit cards and try to explain it to anyone who wants to begin their journey with them. As my circle goes, a lot of folks are quite apprehensive of using credit cards. And few also look down upon them. So I thought the best way to explain would be writing about it and sharing details one piece at a time. So my journey with these oft looked down upon plastic began way back in 2017. Back then even I was wary of them, since I had seen a few very close people get stuck with the credit loop. And to be honest that scared the living daylight out of me. My first credit card, which I had got with my salary account for free, was rotting away in a drawer somewhere. But a couple of years into my own corporate life, one of my seniors explained to me that they would only use cards for...