Dattatray Dagale

Why Do I Pay More Tax Than My Friend on Less Income?

I got this wrong for three years. Seriously. Three years of earning, filing returns, and thinking I understood how income tax worked in India. Then one evening at a Morningstar team lunch in Powai, my colleague Priya casually mentioned her tax bill, and I did the math on a napkin. She earned ₹2 lakhs more than me annually but paid less tax. I sat there, Dal…

Should You Invest ₹5 Lakh All at Once or Break It Into Monthly Chunks?

Last month, my colleague Priya got a ₹5 lakh bonus. She sat across from me at our Morningstar desk in Mumbai, laptop open to her Groww app, genuinely stuck between two choices. One voice in her head screamed: "Invest it all now — don't time the market!" The other whispered: "What if the market crashes next week? Start small, invest monthly.&q…

The Mutual Fund Mistakes I Made Before Understanding How to Actually Start

I Thought Mutual Funds Were Too Complicated (They're Not) When I first joined Morningstar three years ago, I was surrounded by analysts discussing P/E ratios, AUM figures, and fund performance metrics. I sat at my desk thinking: *This is it. I'm going to learn investing.* I didn't. Instead, I spent the first six months nodding along to conversatio…

Stop Reading Random Finance Books. Read These Four Instead

I used to think that reading books on money was like going to the gym — the more you do it, the better you become. So between 2019 and 2021, I read everything. Rich Dad Poor Dad . The Intelligent Investor . A Random Walk Down Wall Street . Atomic Habits (because apparently habits matter for money too). I'd finish one book and immediately start the next,…

You Don't Need Every Finance App. You Need a Filter.

Last Tuesday, I counted the notifications on my phone. Moneycontrol. ET Markets. Groww. Zerodha. CNBC-TV18. My banking app. A WhatsApp group dedicated entirely to stock market memes. Eighteen unread alerts, and it wasn't even 10 AM. I closed the phone and thought: This is insane. Here's what I realized — staying updated with finance news isn't ab…

Can Anime Actually Change How You Think About Money and Life?

I didn't expect to learn about financial discipline from a show about a kid making rice balls. But here's what happened: around 11 PM on a Tuesday, sitting in the local train from Bandra back to Kalyan after a long day at Morningstar, I was scrolling through my phone and stumbled on a scene from *Jujutsu Kaisen*. The protagonist, Yuji, was making a del…