These lines are dedicated to someone very special in my life. I would wish this person lives happily ever in life.
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They said it: Love is about giving ... giving happiness and care ... giving love, there is no question of asking love in return.

Love is not a business.

Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game, that counts!

Work like you don't need the money.

Dance like no one is watching, and love like you have never been hurt.

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen.

There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.
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Tax benefits from Health Insurance

Health, though important, is by far the most neglected aspect when it comes to health expenses. Notwithstanding the rising medical expenses - thanks
to the hectic lifestyle - not many people in the country today have adequate insurance covers.

While the public may not be concerned, government ensures that citizens protect themselves and their dear ones with adequate medical cover by giving tax breaks on expenses incurred for getting health insured.

HEALTH INSURANCE

Premium paid up to Rs 15,000 on a medical insurance policy is exempted from tax under section 80D of the Income Tax Act. A tax-payer paying premium toward insurance cover of dependant parents shall be entitled to an additional tax benefit of up to Rs 15,000.

If the parents are senior citizens, then this limit gets enhanced to Rs 20,000. Thus, the maximum tax benefit that a taxpayer can now avail by insuring the health of his/her entire family (including dependant parents) is Rs 30,000 or Rs 35,000 as the case may be.

MEDICAL EXPENSES

Salaried employees are eligible for taxfree medical reimbursement from their employer up to a maximum of Rs 15,000 per annum. If the tax-payer incurs expenses (up to Rs 50,000)for medical treatment (including nursing, training and rehabilitation ) of a disabled dependant, the same shall be reduced from the taxable income per annum under section 80DD. Where however, the dependant suffers from severe disability, the amount of deduction shall be Rs 75,000 per annum.

Disability, for the purpose of this section includes autism, cerebral palsy and also mental retardation.

Any amount spent on the medical treatment of a dependant suffering from diseases like cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, chronic renal failure, Thalassaemia etc. can be claimed as a deduction from the taxable income up to a maximum of Rs 40,000 under section 80DDB of the Income Tax Act. In case the dependant is a senior citizen, the amount of deduction shall get enhanced to Rs 60,000 per annum.

LIFE INSURANCE

Any amount paid as a premium to cover the life of the tax-payer , his/her spouse or children shall be eligible for deduction from the total taxable income under section 80C of the Income Tax Act, up to a maximum of Rs 1 lakh per annum.

It is however important to note that this deduction is applicable provided the amount of premium paid does not exceed 20% of the sum assured by the insurance policy. (Sum assured is the amount ought to be received by the policy-holder from the insurance company after completion of the policy term. This term is usually referred to in case of endowment and money-back plans.)

Lessons from management

Short Selling and Short Squeeze

At any given point, only a certain amount of a publicly traded company’s stock is floating freely in the market. The rest is held in various portfolios, funds, and investment vehicles. Now, everyone’s familiar with the basic idea behind the stock market: you buy stock when it costs little, and you sell it when it costs a lot, profiting on the difference.

But that assumes a company’s value is going to increase. What if, instead of betting a company will go up, you want to make money betting the company will go down? You can — by selling stock you don’t own.

Say you borrow a certain amount of stock from someone who already owns it. You pay a fixed fee for borrowing the stock, and you sign a contract saying you will return exactly the same amount of stock you took after some amount of time. So, you might borrow a thousand shares of Apple stock from me (I don’t actually own any, but play along), pay me $100 for the privilege, and sign an obligation to return my stock in 3 months. At the time, Apple stock is worth $10 per share.

After you borrow the stock, you immediately sell it. At $10 a share, you get $10,000. Two and a half months later, another rumor about Steve Jobs’ health sends AAPL crashing to only $6 per share for a few hours, so you buy a thousand shares, costing you $6,000. You give me back those shares. Because you successfully bet the company would go down in value, you earned $4,000 minus the borrowing fee. This is called short-selling or shorting the stock, and the downside is obvious: if your bet was wrong, you would have lost money buying back the shares that you have to return to your lender.

When Volkswagen’s share price exceeded the point where it made sense for Porsche to buy the company, a number of hedge funds realized that Volkswagen shares have nowhere to go but down. With Porsche out of the picture, there was simply no reason for VW to keep going up, and the funds were willing to bet on it. So they shorted huge amounts of VW stock, borrowing it from existing owners and selling it into circulation, waiting for the price drop they considered inevitable.

Porsche anticipated exactly this situation and promptly bought up much of these borrowed VW shares that the funds were selling. Do you see where this is going? Analysts did. According to The Economist, Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley warned clients not to play “billionaire’s poker” against Porsche. Porsche denied any foul play, saying it wasn’t doing anything unusual.

But then, last October 26th, they stepped forward and bared their portfolio: through a combination of stock and options, they owned 75% of Volkswagen, which is almost all the company’s circulating stock. (The remainder is tied up in funds that cannot easily release it.)

To put it mildly, the numbers scared the living hell out of the hedge funds: if they didn’t immediately buy back the Volkswagen stock they were shorting, there might not be any left to buy later, and it isn’t their stock — they have to return it to someone. If their only option is thus to buy the VW stock from Porsche, then the miracle of supply and demand will hit again, and Porsche can ask for whatever price it wants per VW share — twenty times their value, a hundred times their value — because there’s no other place to buy. They’re the only game in town.

And that, my friends, is called a short squeeze.

Variable Change - Interesting concept I learn

While watching movie '21', there was a puzzle which made me think for a while before accepting what was told in the movie. Then one day, I went on internet and searched about the concept of Variable Change. To my surprise, many other viewers had come to internet to find answer to that puzzle discussed in the movie.

It was about a game show where a player is shown three doors behind one of which is the precious gift which the player can win if he correctly tells which door is it.

After little search on net, I found this link on internet useful in understanding the puzzle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Sometimes, movies just dont stop at entertaining our lives, they do give us other learnings which we otherwise would never come across :)

Cheers,
Sachin