Tax for investors
What do you keep after tax, on each kind of gain?
9 of 9 chapters published
Chapters
Beginner
- The Act that changedThe Income-tax Act 1961 was repealed on 1 April 2026 and replaced by the Income-tax Act 2025. It imposes no new taxes — it rewrites the law in fewer sections and renames the year you are being taxed on.
- The five headsEvery rupee of income is classified into one of five heads before anything else happens. Which head it lands in decides how it is taxed — and most confusion about investment tax is really confusion about classification.
- Where investment income landsInterest is other sources at slab rates; gains on selling are capital gains under their own regime; dividends and rent have their own treatment. Two investments paying the same return can leave you with very different amounts.
Intermediate
- Capital gainsThree conditions must hold: a capital asset, a transfer, and a gain. Nothing is taxed until you sell, which hands you control over timing that no other head of income offers.
- TDS and advance taxBoth are the government collecting through the year rather than at the end. Neither settles what you owe — and treating TDS as settlement produces a demand later, while ignoring refundable TDS is money quietly left behind.
- The filing cycleA tax year runs April to March, and the return for it is filed in the months after. The new Act renamed the year to remove a genuine confusion, and reduced the forms from 399 to 190.
Advanced
- Tax-advantaged vehiclesSome wrappers change the tax treatment of what is inside them. They are worth using and they are not a reason to buy a bad product — and the tax tail wagging the investment dog is the most expensive habit in this subject.
- Tax and your real returnTax is charged on nominal income, including the part that merely kept pace with prices. So the effective rate on the only part that mattered is far above your marginal rate, and it rises as inflation does.
- A tax planClassify, locate, defer, document, verify. Five habits that survive every Finance Act, because none of them depends on a rate — and the sixth is knowing which decisions need advice before the transaction rather than after.