Fixing India's bad money habits

When I wrote my first column in this series many years ago, I was addressing a very different India. The number of people investing in mutual funds was a small fraction of what it is today, and the idea that ordinary savers would one day invest Rs 29,000 crore every month through SIPs would have seemed like a fantasy. Yet here we are. My association with this publication goes back much further than these fifteen years. ET Wealth is the successor to the original ET Investor's Guide, with which I had been associated since 1993, over three decades ago. Back then, I initiated mutual fund coverage in its pages, and for years, the data and analysis in Investor's Guide came from Value Research. When the ET Now TV channel was launched, we ran a weekly show, Investors Guide on Ideal Portfolios, for many years. Through all these avatars--the core mission has remained the same: helping ordinary savers make sense of their money. Suggested read: Numeracy makes for better investors Looking back at those early columns, I'm struck by how much of the advice remains unchanged — keep things simple, don't trust salespeople, avoid derivatives, buy term insurance in