Before You Sign for That Loan: What an EMI Really Costs You

 

Festival season is loan season. The scooter ads, the "zero down payment" phone offers, the cousin who just got a personal loan approved in two days. Somebody tells you the EMI is "only Rs 11,000 a month," and it sounds manageable.

The monthly amount is the number lenders want you to look at. It's the least useful number on the page. Before I sign for anything now, I work out three other things: the total I'll pay back, how the interest is calculated, and what the loan does to my monthly budget. It takes ten minutes, and it has talked me out of at least one bad decision.

A Simple Money Plan for Families Living on Remittance

Walk through almost any village in Nepal and you'll find houses built with money earned in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi, Korea or Japan. Remittance keeps millions of families going. But I also hear the same story again and again: years of hard work abroad, and very little saved by the time the worker comes home.

It's rarely because anyone was careless. Usually there was just no plan that everyone agreed on.

Saving or Investing? It Depends on When You Need the Money

People often ask me, "Should I save or invest?" My answer is always another question: when do you need the money?

That one question settles most of the decision. Not your age, not what your friends are doing, not what the market did last month. Just the date.

How to Build an Emergency Fund When Your Income Isn't Fixed

"Save three to six months of expenses." Easy to say if you get the same salary on the same day every month. Much harder if you drive for a ride app, run a small shop, farm, freelance for foreign clients, work in construction, or depend on remittance that doesn't always come on time.

Most people in Nepal fall into that second group. A huge share of the workforce is informal, seasonal or self-employed. So this post is for them: people whose income goes up and down and who still want a safety net.

A Monthly Budget You'll Actually Stick To

I've started and abandoned more budgets than I can count. The ones that failed had one thing in common: they described the person I wished I was, not the person I actually was. Rs 3,000 a month for food? Sure, on paper. In real life, by the 12th I'd already gone over and given up on the whole thing.

A budget that works is boring and honest. It's built on what you really spend, it includes the things you'd rather forget about (hello, Dashain), and it leaves a little room for fun so you don't rebel against it.

Here's how I build one now, step by step.

Managing Money in Nepal: Where I'd Start If I Were Starting Over

Most money advice online is written for people in the US or India. It talks about credit scores, 401(k)s and investing apps we don't even have here. So I'm starting this series with the basics, written for how money actually moves in a Nepali household: a salary or a small business, remittance from a brother in Qatar, a loan from the cooperative, Dashain shopping, and relatives who need help when something goes wrong.

None of this is complicated. The hard part is doing it in the right order. Plenty of people open a Demat account before they have even Rs 10,000 set aside for emergencies, and then they're forced to sell shares at a loss the first time someone in the family gets sick.

If I had to start from zero again, this is the order I'd go in.