Friday, September 09, 2005

Money and Risk

One of the best magazines on personal finance is Outlook Money. Its latest issue has an interesting article on the customization of personal financial services: Your unique nest egg (available for free online!). An interesting point I've begun to realize since I've started working is that structuring and managing personal finance is as interesting an area as corporate finance. And the same principles apply here too, with the added complexity that your emotions come into play (however rational you try to become) in your investment and spending patterns. Just choosing an tax-saving fund to invest in, is an exciting exercise by itself. If you thought the cost of capital is a concept only for companies, just wait till you realize that you could save money by carefully delaying repayments on loans and investing that money in higher income yielding opportunities (as this article rightly points out).

One of the best magazines on (corporate) finance is Risk (it also happens to be one of the least touched magazines in XLRI's library :P). The magazine simply represents the state of the art in finance - it is what slashdot/wired is to the geeks or what MSDN mag is to win-devs. What is unfortunate in finance is that very few people love the field (except for its money) so much as to be its 'hackers'.

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