From 1st April, here's what changes for your personal finance & taxation

The new financial year begins on the 1st of April. With the new year, comes a whole host of changes as far as your personal finance and personal taxation is concerned. Let’s recap some of the most important ones.

1. The new tax regime with all the changes announced in the budget, will come into effect. The new regime becomes your default tax regime, unless you specifically opt for the old one. Remember, the new regime has no tax-saving investment benefits, but you pay a lower tax rate.

2. A big change was recently announced for debt funds
Beginning 1st of April, debt mutual funds will not get any capital gains tax benefit and no indexation benefit. Essentially it means that whatever returns you make from debt funds will be taxed as per your income tax slabs just like for fixed deposits. But this is only applicable to new investments from the first of April.

3. In another change, if the total premium paid on life insurance policies (except ULIPs) is more than 5 lakhs in a year, then whatever you get on maturity will be taxable. Again, this applies beginning April 1st.

4. In the real estate space, Capital gains only up to 10 crore used to buy property is exempt from tax under section 54F. So for example, if you’ve made capital gains of 15 cr and you use that 15 cr to buy a residential property, earlier the entire amount was exempt from tax. Now it will be capped at Rs 10 Cr, and you will have to pay tax on the balance 5 crore.

5. The government has raised the maximum deposit limit for the Senior Citizen Savings Scheme (SCSS) to Rs 30 lakh from Rs 15 lakh.

6. Not just that, the deposit limit for monthly income scheme is also increased to 9 lakh from 4.5 lakh for single accounts to and to 15 lakh for joint accounts.

7. Conversion of physical gold to electronic gold receipts and vice-versa will not attract any capital gains tax.