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An annual review is a fixed session, once in a financial year, in which the household checks the items that drift if nobody looks at them. It is not a second attempt to choose mutual funds. Fund selection was covered in Wealth Creation. This review is about tax, loans, cash coming in and going out, names of nominees, and whether last year’s tax regime still fits this year’s rent, loan and investments.
Set a date. For most families, June is practical: Form 16 is usually available, and the return is not yet overdue. Write the answers down. A review that lives only in conversation will be repeated from memory next year.
Download the annual information statement. Place every item under a head: salary, house property, business if any, capital gains, other sources. Run the old regime and the new regime on this year’s facts — house-rent allowance, housing-loan interest, health-insurance premium, and the investments you actually hold. Do not copy last year’s choice without that calculation. If a sale is planned, complete the tax estimate before the sale, not after.
List every loan and card: rate, outstanding amount, and whether the card is paid in full each month. If an unsecured balance remains, it is the first use of any extra money. Check whether the monthly instalments would still be payable if one income stopped for six months, using only the emergency reserve. If the answer is no, do not add a commitment this year.
Read the nominee on the provident fund, the public provident fund, each mutual-fund folio, each bank account, and each insurance policy. A marriage, a birth, a death, or a divorce is a reason to change a name. An old nominee can delay money that the family will need. Confirm that health and term cover are still in force and that the sum assured is still in line with the family’s present income. Those products belong to Wealth Protection. They still belong on this list because a lapsed policy is an optimization failure as well as a protection failure.
Ask whether a child, a house, a new city, or a change of job has made last year’s plan the wrong plan. If yes, change the amounts and the dates. Do not open extra folios only to mark the event.
A nominee on a mutual-fund folio does not replace a will. It tells the fund house whom to pay first. Both the nominee and the wider estate plan need to be current. Estate planning itself belongs to Wealth Transition. Updating the nominee does not.
The Shetty household in Mandya held their first written review on a Saturday in June. They found a card that was being paid only in part, a tax regime copied from a colleague, and a provident-fund nominee who was a parent from before their marriage. They cleared the card over three months, computed both regimes, and changed the nominee. No new fund was purchased. The file was shorter at the end of the day than at the start.
Most of what goes wrong in a year is not a wrong fund. It is a regime that was not checked, a balance that was not cleared, and a name that was not updated.
Spending the annual session on ranking tables and leaving Form 16, the card statement and the nominee list unopened.