Investments & loans

Put ₹1,00,000 into a fixed deposit, and it isn’t gone — a year later it comes back as ₹1,05,000. That looks like a transfer: the same money, changing form. But finzu doesn’t treat it like one, and the reason matters.

A transfer (moving ₹10,000 from savings to another account of yours) doesn’t change what you can spend — the money’s still sitting in an account you can draw on tomorrow. The ₹1,00,000 in your fixed deposit isn’t like that: for the next year, it’s off the table. You can’t spend it on rent, and you had to plan around not having it. That’s a real fact about your cash flow, even though nothing was earned or lost yet — so finzu counts it, under its own category (Investment, say), instead of excluding it the way a transfer is excluded.

The same logic runs the other way for a loan. An EMI payment is partly interest (a real cost) and partly paying down what you owe (not spending, but not available elsewhere either). Finzu doesn’t try to split the two — the whole payment counts as a real monthly outflow under its own category (Loan, say), because knowing you need ₹20,000 set aside every month for your EMI matters more than knowing exactly how much of it was interest that particular month.

The test: is this money still available to you?

That’s the line finzu draws between a transfer and an investment or loan payment. Available elsewhere, same liquidity, just relocated → Transfer, excluded from your totals entirely. Committed for a period, even though it’s still yours (or still owed by you) → its own category, counted in your cash flow like anything else — just kept separate so it doesn’t blend into ordinary spending.

What this can and can’t tell you

For something with a fixed, known outcome — a fixed deposit, a loan once it’s fully paid off — totaling that category’s inflows and outflows over its whole life gives you the exact right answer: what you put in, versus what you got back or paid in total. It just isn’t visible until the deposit matures or the loan closes.

For anything whose value moves with the market — stocks, mutual funds, gold — finzu can only ever show you cash in and cash out, never whether you’re currently up or down. Knowing your current portfolio value needs a live price, which finzu doesn’t fetch — that’s what your broker or fund statement is for. Finzu’s job is the cash-flow picture: how much you’ve committed, and when.

Next: turning this organized picture into a plan.