Income Tax Rates

Time of the year again when we have to file our income tax. E-filing at IncomeTaxIndiaEfiling is made mandatory for people with annual income above Rs 5 lakh. The last date for filing of individual income tax return this time is 31st July 2014. The first question that comes to mind when we think of filing income tax is - what are ...

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Getting A Safe Deposit Locker in SBI

For quite sometime I was thinking of getting a safe deposit locker but somehow it kept on slipping down the priority list. I thought it will be better to get one in a public bank as fees would be low comparative to private banks. But there were no availabilities in the banks where I tried. So when a new branch of SBI got opened near my house, I grabbed the chance and went there to ask the ...

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Understanding Form 15G/H & Submitting Form Online

If your FDs in a particular bank are earning interests exceeding Rs 10000/- in a year, that bank will cut TDS(Tax deducted at source) @ 10% on the interest amount. Now if your total income is below 2 Lakhs (basic exemption limit currently), you are not liable to pay any taxes and hence you need to tell the bank not to cut TDS on FD interest. Form 15G/H is the way to tell this to your bank. If you ...

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Voluntary Contribution to EPF - A good tax saving tool

It is a common knowledge that a salaried employee has to contribute 12% of his basic salary towards EPF. But do you know that you can opt to contribute more than the mandatory 12% ? I did not know this until recently and when I researched about it, I found it to be a good tax saving tool for risk-averse-me. Lets discuss the details.

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Is your company depositing your EPF every month? Find it out online

While reading on net I came to know that there have been some cases where the employer has deducted the EPF (Provident Fund / PF) money from employee's salary and then did not deposit that money to EPFO.

If you want to be sure that your EPF contribution has been deposited to EPFO (Employee Provident Fund Office), here are some of the ways to check it online -

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Interest rate on EPF deposits for year 2013-14

Update: Finance Ministry has approved the EPF interest rate of 8.75% for the financial year 2013-14. EPFO has proposed to raise the interest rate on EPF deposits to 8.75% for the financial year 2013-14. The interest rate in the previous financial year was 8.5%. This proposal was made on January 13, 2014 ([related news](http://www.business-standard.com/article/pf/epfo-raises-interest-rate-to-8...

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How much is the employer's contribution in EPF ?

Until recently, I was under the impression that employer contributes an amount equal to the employee's contribution in EPF. That's what most of us think, right? But its not true in every case. It depends on the employee's basic salary and the company's policy on EPF. I have summarized here the different cases and options -

Case 1 : Employee salary (basic + DA) less than ...

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Track EPF account online with E-Passbook

Having heard recently of e-Passbook facility of EPF, I decided to track my EPF account online. For those who don't know - e-Passbook has all the EPF transactions recorded month-wise and date-wise to make it easier to track our own EPF account. These transactions include the following -

  1. Employer contribution deposited by employer to EPFO
  2. Employee Contribution deposited by employer to ...

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Income Tax Refund Received Within 2 Months !!

Today I got a message from my bank that 7K Rs have been deposited to my account. It looked like the depositor was IT Department as the message bore the language "AY2013-14". So I quickly checked my account statement and my ITRV to match the refund amount. And YES!! I had got my tax refund money that too with interest (although minuscule). I was delighted at the fast-like-a-flash response of our IT...

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Interest on Fixed Deposit - To declare or not to declare in Income Tax Return?

Every year while filing Income Tax returns, a common dilemma that we all face is - whether to declare income from Fixed Deposit interest or not. Many doubts and questions arise in our minds - Is it necessary to declare? Should I save some tax by not declaring it? If I don’t declare, how are they going to know how much income I have earned from FD interest? What do other people do? ..... And the ...

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