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A plain-language reference for every investing, retirement, tax and protection term you will meet, including the ones specific to how time.money works.

83 terms across 9 categories · reviewed September 2026

Wealth Management & Financial Advisory

AUM-Based Fee: An advisory or portfolio-management fee charged as a percentage of the assets being managed (Assets Under Management), typically 0.5 to 2% a year. Because the fee scales with portfolio size rather than the work involved, AUM-based pricing can quietly cost a growing investor far more over time than a flat, subscription-based fee.
Fee-Only Advisor: An advisor compensated solely through fees paid directly by the client (a flat fee, or subscription) with no commission from third party product sales. This model removes the incentive to recommend higher-commission products, aligning the advisor's interest with the client's.
Fiduciary Duty: A legal obligation to act solely in the client's best interest, ahead of the advisor's own commercial interest. SEBI-registered Investment Advisers owe clients a fiduciary duty; commission-earning distributors do not.
Financial Advisor: A professional who helps individuals plan and manage their money, from budgeting and tax planning to investing and retirement. In India, only a SEBI-registered Investment Adviser (RIA) can legally use the term "advice" for personalised recommendations; everyone else is technically a distributor.
Financial Planning: The structured process of setting financial goals (buying a home, funding a child's education, retiring comfortably) and mapping investments, term and health insurance, and cash flow to achieve them, typically revisited as life circumstances change.
Flat-Fee / Subscription-Based Advisory: An advisory model where the client pays a fixed periodic fee, independent of portfolio size or transactions, for ongoing planning and guidance. It is the pricing model time.money runs on: the fee doesn't rise just because the portfolio does, and it importantly removes the incentive to churn or upsell products.
Mutual Fund Distributor: An AMFI-registered intermediary who sells mutual fund products and earns a trail commission from the fund house, embedded in the product's expense ratio.
Registered Investment Adviser (RIA): An individual or firm registered with SEBI under the Investment Advisers Regulations, 2013, permitted to give personalised, fee-based investment advice in a fiduciary capacity, meaning the advisor is legally bound to act in the client's best interest, not to earn commission on products sold.
Wealth Management: The professional management of an individual's investments, goals, and overall financial life, distinct from simply buying or selling financial products. In India, wealth management can be delivered on an advisory basis (SEBI-registered, fiduciary-led) or distribution basis (product-led); the two are regulated differently and carry different fee structures.

Net Worth & Financial Wellness

Behaviour Gap: The difference between the returns a mutual fund or index actually generates and the (usually lower) returns its investors actually earn, caused by panic-selling in downturns, chasing performance, and other timing mistakes. Closing the behaviour gap, not just picking the right fund, is often the single biggest lever on long-term wealth.
Credit Wellness / Credit Score: A numeric indicator (in India, typically the CIBIL or Experian score, ranging roughly 300 to 900) of how reliably a person has repaid past debt, used by lenders to price and approve new credit. A healthy credit score keeps borrowing costs low and loan approvals fast.
Financial Literacy: The knowledge and confidence needed to make informed decisions about saving, investing, borrowing, and protecting money, consistently one of the strongest predictors of long-term wealth outcomes, independent of income level.
Financial Wellness Score: A composite score that reflects the overall health of a person's finances, typically combining how well their investment portfolio is structured (Portfolio Wellness) with how responsibly they manage credit and debt (Credit Wellness), often expressed on a single 0 to 900 scale for easy tracking over time.
Goal-Based Investing: An approach that ties each investment to a specific financial goal (retirement, a child's education, a home down payment) with its own time horizon and risk profile, rather than investing generically and figuring out the purpose later.
Net Worth: The sum of everything you own (bank balances, investments, property, gold) minus everything you owe (loans, credit card dues). Tracking net worth over time, rather than any single account balance, is the simplest way to see whether your overall financial position is improving.
Net Worth Tracker: A tool that consolidates bank accounts, investments, loans, and other assets and liabilities in one place to compute and monitor net worth automatically, typically using an Account Aggregator and Credit Bureau to pull live data instead of manual entry.
Portfolio Wellness / Portfolio Health: A diagnostic score for an investment portfolio itself, assessing factors like asset allocation, liquidity, cost efficiency, and protection coverage against what's appropriate for the investor's age and life stage, distinct from a net-worth number, which only measures size, not structure.
Behaviour Analysis: time.money's assessment of the behavioural traits that shape investing outcomes (Financial Engagement, Optimism, and Future Orientation) alongside the Behaviour Gap concept. It sits next to Portfolio Wellness because how someone behaves with their money often matters as much as how it's allocated.
Optimism: A behavioural trait reflecting how confident a person feels about their financial future improving over time. A healthy degree of optimism supports staying invested and taking on appropriate risk, while excessive optimism can lead to under-preparing for setbacks.
Future Orientation: A behavioural trait reflecting how much a person prioritises long-term financial goals (retirement, a child's education) over present-day spending or short-term outcomes. Investors with stronger future orientation tend to save more consistently toward long-horizon goals.
Financial Engagement: How actively a person tracks, reviews, and interacts with their own finances (checking statements, reviewing portfolio performance, acting on nudges) as distinct from how much wealth they hold. Low engagement is one of the strongest early predictors of drift away from a financial plan.
Wealth Analysis: time.money's assessment of how well a person understands the mechanics behind their own portfolio (investment cost, inflation, and wealth compounding) alongside their grasp of sound portfolio design. It runs alongside Behaviour Analysis as part of the overall Financial Wellness picture.
Financial Understanding (Wealth Analysis): A person's grasp of core investing concepts: how costs like expense ratios compound over time, how inflation erodes real returns, and what sound portfolio design (diversification, asset allocation) actually looks like. Weak financial understanding is strongly correlated with costly, avoidable investing mistakes, independent of income or portfolio size.
Wealth Compounding (as a Wealth Analysis factor): How well a person grasps the way investment returns generate their own returns over time, turning steady contributions into exponential rather than linear growth. It's assessed as part of Wealth Analysis alongside cost and inflation understanding, distinct from the Wealth Compounding Estimator tool, which lets a user calculate this effect for a specific goal.

Mutual Fund & Investment Essentials

Actively Managed Fund: A mutual fund where a fund manager actively selects and adjusts holdings with the goal of outperforming a benchmark index, in exchange for a higher expense ratio than a passive index fund.
Asset Allocation: The mix of asset classes (equity, debt, gold, real estate, cash) an investor holds, generally the single biggest driver of a portfolio's long-term risk and return, more so than the choice of individual funds or stocks within each class.
Assets Under Management (AUM): The total market value of the investments a fund house, advisor, or platform manages on behalf of clients. At the fund level, AUM is often loosely used as a proxy for investor confidence; at the advisory level, it's also the base many advisors use to calculate their fee.
Benchmark: A reference index (such as Nifty 50 or Nifty 500) against which a fund's performance is measured, letting an investor judge whether a fund manager is actually adding value or simply riding the broader market.
CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate): The annualised rate at which an investment would have grown if it had compounded steadily over a period, smoothing out year-to-year volatility into a single comparable number. CAGR works well for lump-sum investments but is not appropriate for SIPs, where XIRR is the correct measure.
Direct Plan vs Regular Plan: Two versions of the same mutual fund scheme: a Direct Plan is bought straight from the fund house with no distributor commission, resulting in a lower expense ratio, while a Regular Plan is bought through an intermediary who earns a trail commission, built into a higher expense ratio.
Diversification: Spreading investments across asset classes, sectors, and fund categories so that no single loss can meaningfully damage overall wealth. Diversification reduces risk but, unlike asset allocation, doesn't eliminate the need to still pick each category deliberately.
Equity Linked Savings Scheme (ELSS): A tax-saving mutual fund category investing primarily in equities, offering a deduction of up to ₹1.5 lakh under Section 80C, with a mandatory 3-year lock-in, the shortest lock-in among all Section 80C tax-saving instruments.
Exit Load: A fee charged by a mutual fund if units are redeemed before a specified holding period, designed to discourage short-term trading. It's typically a small percentage of the redemption value and doesn't apply once the minimum holding period has passed.
Expense Ratio: The annual fee a mutual fund charges, expressed as a percentage of the amount invested, covering fund management and administration costs. A 1% difference in expense ratio compounds meaningfully over a long horizon, one of the reasons Direct Plans are often preferred over Regular Plans.
Fund of Funds (FoF): A mutual fund that invests in other mutual funds or ETFs rather than directly in stocks or bonds, often used to access asset classes like gold or international equity through a single India-domiciled scheme.
Index Fund: A mutual fund that passively replicates a market index (such as the Nifty 50) rather than trying to beat it through active stock selection. Index funds typically carry a much lower expense ratio than actively managed funds, since there's no active research or trading decision to fund.
Lock-in Period: The minimum duration an investor must hold a fund before being allowed to redeem it. ELSS carries a mandatory 3-year lock-in; most other open-ended mutual funds carry none, though an exit load may apply for early withdrawal.
Net Asset Value (NAV): The per-unit price of a mutual fund, calculated by dividing the fund's total assets (minus liabilities) by the number of units outstanding. A higher or lower NAV says nothing about whether a fund is cheap or expensive; only its underlying returns and costs matter.
Portfolio Rebalancing: Periodically adjusting a portfolio back to its target asset allocation after market movements have pushed it off course, for example by trimming equity that has run up and adding to debt that has lagged, to keep risk in line with the original plan.
Systematic Investment Plan (SIP): A method of investing a fixed amount in a mutual fund at regular intervals (usually monthly) rather than as a lump sum. SIPs enforce disciplined investing and use rupee-cost averaging (buying more units when prices are low and fewer when prices are high) to smooth out market volatility over time.
Systematic Withdrawal Plan (SWP): A facility that lets an investor withdraw a fixed amount from an existing mutual fund investment at regular intervals, the reverse of a SIP, commonly used to generate a regular post-retirement income stream from an accumulated corpus.
XIRR (Extended Internal Rate of Return): The most accurate way to measure returns on investments made at irregular intervals, such as SIPs, top-ups, or partial withdrawals, because it accounts for the exact timing and size of each cash flow, unlike simple average return calculations.

Retirement & Long-Term Planning

Employees' Provident Fund (EPF): A mandatory retirement savings scheme for salaried employees in India, with contributions from both employee and employer, government-set interest rates, and EEE (exempt-exempt-exempt) tax treatment.
Inflation: The rate at which the general price level rises over time, eroding the purchasing power of money that isn't invested to keep pace. India's long-run average inflation has hovered around 5 to 7% a year, a key input in any retirement or goal-planning calculation.
National Pension System (NPS): A government-regulated, market-linked retirement savings scheme open to all Indian citizens, offering an additional ₹50,000 tax deduction under Section 80CCD(1B) over and above the Section 80C limit, with returns dependent on the chosen equity-debt mix.
Power of Compounding: The effect by which investment returns themselves start earning returns, causing wealth to grow exponentially rather than linearly over time. The earlier money is invested, the longer compounding has to work, which is why starting early tends to matter more than starting big.
Public Provident Fund (PPF): A government-backed, long-term savings scheme with a 15-year lock-in, quarterly-revised interest rates, EEE tax status, and an annual contribution cap of ₹1.5 lakh, a low-risk anchor for the debt portion of many long-term Indian portfolios.
Real Rate of Return: The return on an investment after subtracting inflation, the actual increase in purchasing power. A fixed deposit earning 7% in a year of 6% inflation delivers a real return of roughly 1%, not 7%.
Retirement Corpus: The total sum of money an individual needs to have accumulated by retirement to sustain their desired lifestyle for the rest of their life, factoring in inflation, expected longevity, and post-retirement returns.
Retirement Readiness: A measure of how on-track a person's current savings and investment trajectory are, relative to the retirement corpus they'll actually need, typically expressed as a percentage or a gap amount rather than a single yes/no answer.
Rule of 72: A quick mental-math shortcut to estimate how many years it takes an investment to double: divide 72 by the expected annual rate of return. At a 12% return, for instance, money roughly doubles every six years.

Protection & Insurance

Emergency Fund: A pool of easily accessible savings set aside specifically for unplanned expenses (job loss, a medical emergency, urgent repairs), sized to cover a defined number of months of essential expenses, so a shock doesn't force a costly loan or a disruptive sale of long-term investments.
Health Insurance: A policy that covers hospitalisation and, depending on the plan, related medical expenses, protecting savings and investments from being liquidated to pay for a medical emergency.
Life Cover Ratio: A rule-of-thumb multiple of annual income used to estimate adequate term insurance cover, commonly cited as 10 to 15x annual income, though the right number depends on dependents, existing liabilities, and other assets.
Protection Gap: The shortfall between the life or health insurance cover a person actually holds and the cover they'd realistically need to protect their dependents' financial future or absorb a medical shock, one of the most commonly underestimated risks in Indian household finances.
Sum Assured: The guaranteed payout amount specified in an insurance policy, payable to the nominee (for life insurance) or the policyholder (for health insurance) on a valid claim.
Term Insurance: A pure life insurance policy that pays a lump sum (the sum assured) to nominees if the policyholder dies during the policy term, with no maturity payout if they survive it, making it the most cost-efficient way to buy a large amount of life cover.

Tax Terms

Indexation Benefit: Adjusting an asset's purchase price for inflation before computing capital gains tax, historically available on debt mutual funds and real estate, reducing the taxable gain. Indexation was removed for equity investments after the 2024 Budget.
Long-Term Capital Gains (LTCG): Profit from selling an asset held beyond a specified minimum period, which for listed equity and equity mutual funds is more than one year. As of the 2024 Budget, LTCG on equity above ₹1.25 lakh in a financial year is taxed at 12.5%, with no indexation benefit.
Section 80C: A provision of the Income Tax Act allowing deductions of up to ₹1.5 lakh a year for specified investments and expenses, including ELSS, PPF, EPF, and life insurance premiums, under the old tax regime.
Short-Term Capital Gains (STCG): Profit from selling an asset held for less than the specified minimum period. For listed equity and equity mutual funds (held under one year), STCG is taxed at a flat 20%.

Data, Security & Regulation

Account Aggregator (AA): An RBI-regulated framework that lets individuals securely share their financial data (bank accounts, investments, loans) across institutions with explicit, revocable consent, rather than through screen-scraping or manually uploaded statements. It's the infrastructure that lets platforms build an accurate, auto-updating net worth view.
Consent Architecture: The technical and procedural framework governing how, and for how long, a user's financial data is shared with a platform, including the ability to view, modify, and revoke consent at any time, a core requirement under India's Account Aggregator and data protection framework.
Credit Bureau: An institution (such as CIBIL or Experian in India) that collects and maintains credit history data from lenders and computes credit scores, used across the industry to assess a borrower's creditworthiness.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act): India's data protection law governing how personal data, including financial data, must be collected, processed, stored, and deleted, with specific obligations around consent and a user's right to erasure.
eKYC: A digital, paperless version of KYC verification (commonly Aadhaar-based OTP authentication) that lets an investor complete identity verification in minutes instead of submitting physical documents.
Know Your Customer (KYC): The regulatory process of verifying a customer's identity before allowing them to invest, mandatory for all mutual fund and securities market participants in India, typically done once through a KYC Registration Agency (KRA) and reused across platforms.
MF Central: A joint RTA (Registrar and Transfer Agent) initiative providing a single digital platform for mutual fund investors to view holdings, transact, and manage folios across fund houses, used by many platforms as the execution rail for fresh mutual fund investments.
SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India): India's capital markets regulator, responsible for registering and overseeing Investment Advisers, mutual funds, brokers, and other market intermediaries, and for protecting investor interests.

Fintech & Security

API (Application Programming Interface): A secure, standardised channel that lets two software systems exchange data automatically. For example, a platform like time.money pulls bank or mutual fund data directly from an institution's systems instead of relying on a user to type it in manually.
Biometric Authentication: Identity verification using a unique physical trait, such as a fingerprint or iris scan, most commonly encountered in Indian fintech through Aadhaar-based eKYC.
Cloud Security: The set of practices and controls (encryption, access management, monitoring) used to protect data and applications hosted on cloud infrastructure rather than on local servers.
Data Encryption: The process of converting data into a coded form that can only be read with the correct decryption key, used to protect financial information both while it's being transmitted between systems and while it's stored.
Open Banking: A regulatory model that lets individuals authorise third-party apps to securely access their financial data held by banks and other institutions, via APIs rather than shared passwords. India's Account Aggregator framework is its RBI-regulated implementation.
Robo-Advisory: An investment model that generates portfolio recommendations primarily through automated algorithms with limited or no human advisor involvement. It's a different model from time.money's advisory + technology approach, where SEBI-registered human advisory judgment, not an algorithm alone, sits behind every recommendation.
Screen Scraping: An older method of aggregating financial data by logging into an account on a user's behalf using their actual credentials and extracting information from the page. It's largely being phased out in India in favour of the consent-based, credential-free Account Aggregator framework.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): A login or transaction security method requiring two separate proofs of identity (typically a password plus an OTP sent to a registered mobile number), making an account significantly harder to access even if one credential is compromised.

time.money Platform Terms

Advisory Plan: The SEBI-registered advisory stage of the time.money journey, where personalised, fiduciary investment recommendations are generated from the Discovery Plan data, kept explicitly distinct from the platform's non-advisory tools like net worth tracking or the Conversational AI.
Conversational AI (time.money): time.money's AI assistant, currently in testing for loan-related queries, which operates on defined logic and rules to answer questions. It does not provide investment or loan advice, which remains the exclusive domain of the platform's SEBI-registered advisory process.
Discovery Plan: The first stage of the time.money journey, where a user's assets, liabilities, goals, and protection gaps are mapped (via Account Aggregator, Credit Bureau, and manual entry) to build a complete, auto-updating picture of their finances before any advisory recommendation is made.
Fair Value: A time.money framework that classifies a stock or fund as Undervalued, Fairly Valued, or Overvalued relative to its intrinsic worth, using third-party research data as an input for context, not as investment advice, which is reserved for the SEBI-registered Advisory Plan.
Retirement Readiness Estimator (RRE): A time.money tool that projects whether a user's current savings trajectory will meet their retirement needs across defined lifestyle tiers (Essentials, Comfortable, Aspirational), factoring in inflation, expected returns, and years to retirement.
Wealth Compounding Estimator: A time.money tool that projects how a goal's required corpus and monthly investment interact under the power of compounding, letting a user solve for any one variable (target amount, tenure, monthly investment, or expected return) while holding the others fixed.