Next: Work and retirement
Retirement corpus: the arithmetic
A corpus is not a number you reach, it is a number you draw from. Real returns, the order bad years arrive in, and the rules on how much you may take.
24 min
advancedelevated risk
Debt funds: two risks, not one
Debt does not mean safe. Two separate risks decide what a bond fund does to your money — and the category name and the risk box both tell you how much of each.
3 lessons · about 24 minutes · written for reading age 13 · last checked 2026-08-14
Two risks, and they are unrelated
A bond fund can lose money two entirely different ways. Knowing which one a fund is exposed to is most of what there is to understand about it.
8 min
What the category name commits a fund to
Debt schemes sit in seventeen defined categories, and the name is not marketing. Each one binds the fund to a stated duration band or a stated credit floor.
8 min
Reading the risk box
Every open-ended debt scheme displays a three-by-three grid showing the most interest-rate risk and the most credit risk it is permitted to take.
8 min
Debt funds — the whole course
5 questions at the end. Every wrong answer explains itself.
Tools for this
Sources
- Master Circular for Mutual Funds as on March 20, 2026 — scheme categorisation and the Potential Risk Class matrix — Securities and Exchange Board of India · checked 2026-08-14
- Categorization and Rationalization of Mutual Fund Schemes — Securities and Exchange Board of India · checked 2026-08-14