DiaryFolio

Transferring Money to India Many Non-Resident Indians (NRI) transfer/wire their money to India. But many of you are unaware that you are loosing money by just transferring money , paying income tax on your interest rates and also loosing monetary value. This article summarises various non-equity bank accounts and a calculator to show which account to choose (especially in case of a Rupee devaluation). This calculator/guide will help you to choose the best NRI account in Indian banks based on length of deposit, rate and rupee value. Sample NRO vs NRE vs FCNR Calculator. (Please wait as it might take time to load .....) Loading plunk... Comparing NRI accounts would help you to decide which type of account to choose. Below Table shows a summary of the various accounts available. (Please refer to individual banks for accurate data) NRO vs NRE vs FCNR NRO NRE FCNR Definition Non Resident Ordinary Rupee Account Non Resident External Rupee Account Foreign Currency De

UK House Price Index Graphs - Aggregated from various indexes including Land registry House price Index Rightmove House price Index ONS House price Index Halifax House price Index Nationwide House price Index All the historical Data has been shared at : Diaryfolio Google Docs  link Please also check:  http://www.diaryfolio.com/2012/10/planning-to-buy-house-one-stop-shop.html Nationwide Index Halifax Index    RightMove Index     Land Registry Index      Community and Local Index    Please also check the one Stop shop before purchasing house http://www.diaryfolio.com/2012/10/planning-to-buy-house-one-stop-shop.html DataSnapshot  UK House Price Chart

Hope everyone wants to get into the housing ladder. It seems simple, but its NOT. You need to thoroughly invest time before you buy a house. It may be your once in life investment. This has been written mainly for UK house market. Please also see some older articles before you read down Is Renting Cheaper than Buying? Renting vs Buying by NYTimes Should you Rent or Buy Calculator Tools and Sites RightMove , Zoopla aka FindaProperty , Globrix PropertyBee  Plugin - Seller psychology with amended, re-listed prices of properties Mouseprice   or Zoopla - Sold house prices School Finder - Quickly view good schools and ratings Historical Prices - Rightmove , Zoopla Mortgage calculators / Loan / Rate Information All type of mortgage calculations  at MSE MoneyAdvice Calculator Google Mortgage Comparison Mortgage meter  - To show average lending rates from Banks Land Reg Price Calculator - Showing CAGR and price estimation Loanmunger.com - A simple calcul

If you believe that you can't follow the GIMP tutorial ,  you can upload your photos and the sites will do the rest so that it will become printable. Please note, you may need to think of privacy as you are uploading photo to a "cloud service" epassportphoto - Pros:Very flexible, have multiple countries, simple to use.  Cons: Generates only 4 photos and rest used for ads portraitbooth -  Pros: 8 photos in one go  Cons: Bit clunky idphoto4you -  Pros: Flexible, more than 70 countries  Cons: file formats limited. Once you have the photo ready, go to a high street shop like Boots and get a printout.  Prefer 6"x4" photos. epassportphoto http://www.epassportphoto.com/ Choose particular country (eg. UK) then press button: get my photos. Follow instructions. (everywhere put No Thanks !!) Use "Download passport photo sheet image" portraitbooth http://uk.portraitbooth.com/ Click button: Start Photo Booth, pops open a new window (make

Ever wondered why wasting so much money to print your  passport photos? You could easily get 4-8 passport photos for £0.25 instead of £5 !!  That's 20times savings !! The below guide shows "How to Make passport photos at Home" There are two ways you can proceed to create your own passport photos: For Non-technical folks - Upload photo option Semi-Technical or Technical folks  - Do within your PC. Tutorial using GIMP The GIMP tutorial is now split to UK/Australia/India passport photos using GIMP - (3.5cmx4.5cm) US/Indian OCI passport photos using GIMP - 50.8mm x 50.8mm (2" x 2")

I follow quite lot of Business News.  Though the news are so much manipulated, it gives an overall idea of what's going around the business world around you.  I like Bloomberg's ipad application as its very intuitive. Financial Times (www.ft.com) is unfortunately paid. "Economic Times" is good to get news at macro Level, but unfortunately its flooded by Ads !! So you all might know how to read these news papers without ads? Bloomberg is decent, so not worth the effort to remove ads Financial times trick is to use google cache.  For clues on various tags use their RSS  -  http://www.ft.com/rss/home/uk   and use the meta information to search in another window of google. Then click on cache to read the article. (eg Search in google for  site:ft.com Mon, 04 June 2012) Economic times is based in India but they too have RSS feeds which is good.  Use the link  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/rss.cms   to the news without ads. In general, if you get the link

United Kingdom house prices going down.. Some reasons I can think of High value initial money requirements Stricter immigration controls? Value of house more than average wages Un-employment on the rise and no spare money for youth. The long term price trend graph is also going down. The above graphs are very much in-line with the research and bubble market hypothesis as I already noted in my previous post  http://www.diaryfolio.com/2012/03/housing-and-financial-bubble.html There are quite some clever graphs to check if its better to Buy house or Rent including the long term impact NYTimes Graph

Ever wondered about these keywords? I thought they were silly. But I have seen these keywords coming up regularly in yahoo visualise and real-time keywords high in the list. That means fellow netizens are using these keywords a lot. Well, the sites delivering them are limited in quality. Only a handful few are genuine and are regularly updated. Some of them which I know off are HotUKdeals (UK)->  http://www.hotukdeals.com/ Fatwallet (US) ->  http://www.fatwallet.com/ Quidco (UK) ->  http://www.quidco.com/ Groupon (International) ->  http://www.groupon.com  , co.uk   I felt some of the big players like Groupon are hyped than the others. If you are really going behind deals and cash saving you need to visit the above sites with cashback facilities.

I'm not a economic expert , but I like reading articles about finance and markets around the world. We are not sure about the depth of 2008 financial crisis but my opinion is its still in the down-trend There are some excellent articles about housing market. One of the graphs which caught my eye is the "LifeCycle of a bubble"  by " Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue " This bubble varies across countries and I feel it holds true in developed countries like the UK, US and many european countries. The phases are at different stages in various countries. But well worth to be aware of Some Helpful Links for Buying House  One Stop Shop