It is the busy month of March and the tax planning season is at its peak as it is the last month to make investments in tax saving products to avail maximum income tax benefits. David is a 22 year old person working in an MNC. He will be filing his income tax returns for the 1^st time. The entire year David did not do anything about his tax planning and hence the last minute scramble to look for financial products to save tax. David is getting calls from various life insurance agents, mutual fund advisors and bank sales guys etc with each of them explaining to him how their company products are superior in terms of generating handsome returns and tax benefits are compared to products offered by other companies. After receiving so many calls from so many companies and listening to so many options, at the end of the day David is a confused man and is not able to make up his mind on which financial product to go for to save tax. But at the same time if he does not decide quickly he will end up pay a hefty amount of his hard earned money as income tax. Does this situation sound similar to your own situation which you face in March every year? There are lot of people who face this dilemma just like David as they don’t understand the various financial products available for saving tax and the characteristics of these financial products. Through this article we are making an attempt to list some of the financial products and their characteristics (feature).

The RBI announced its Second Quarter Review of Monetary Policy for the Year 2009-10 today and as expected, has left the key rates unchanged. Though the RBI kept key rates unchanged, it hiked Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR), the deposits that commercial banks are to park in government securities, by one percentage points to 25 per cent.

While this should have brought some cheer to the markets, they plunged deeper into the red not only because the RBI looks set to raise interest rates going forward, but also because the central bank has upwardly revised its target inflation by March 2010 end to 6.5% from 5% earlier.

The upward bias in interest rates was apparent from the RBI's move to hike the statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) to 25% from 24%. Having said that, whether interest rates in the future rise or not will depend on whether the inflation continues to rise the way it is doing now, and the economic momentum continues to pick up pace.

This article is about a simple solution to setup your investments. I call it “The 88% Solution”

Why 88%? Because my hunch says, it works for 88% people. It works 88% of the time!

This 88% solution will help young people get started and be 88% right about their investment decisions. That, to me, is a fair start. Along the way, you can customize the solution and make it 100% right for yourself.