Fitness, luxury, credit: The cost of lifestyle choices

A neat 25% slice of income spent on gym memberships, boutique classes, fitness trackers, protein supplements, and the latest wellness fad may get you leaner, but it could just as easily throw your finances off balance and quietly erode long-term financial security.

The wellness industry has done a fabulous job of making us more health-conscious, but orbiting that newfound realization is an industry that’s eyeing your wallet. The tussle isn’t health versus money, but health versus lifestyle creep.

A sensible path to fitness needs clarity and consistency. Narrowing down to a fitness goal and then taking the most cost-effective route to get there can be more rewarding than expensive paraphernalia.

That’s the focus of Ann Jacob’s story. She looked at the kinds of spending people are making in the name of fitness and spoke to fitness experts on how to navigate this costly and alluring maze to strike a fine balance between physical and financial fitness. You need to get leaner, not your savings!

Staying on the topic of spending, there’s another excellent story, one that makes you wonder whether the constant narrative around artificial intelligence taking away jobs has really percolated down to consumer behaviour.

A new class of luxury car buyers is emerging. This is not the traditionally well-heeled, but ambitious professionals, entrepreneurs from smaller cities, and young tech executives eager to taste prestige on wheels. Carmakers are responding by lowering entry barriers through localization and competitive pricing, but bringing the car home is only the upfront cost. The real math lies in the running expenses: hefty insurance premiums, service bills, and the eye-watering cost of repairs.

Sample this: A friend recently paid ₹95,000 to replace a defective seatbelt spring in his German luxury car, as the entire assembly had to be changed. The cost hurts!

In this timely piece, Ashwin Moorthy reminds readers why the total cost of ownership matters. Because when running costs run high, your pride and your finances both quietly take a hit.

It’s been a spending-heavy week at Mint Money. So here’s one more number that deserves attention: India’s credit card usage is surging. The number of active credit cards has more than doubled from 55 million in 2019-20 to over 111 million in 2024-25. Outstanding balances have risen even faster: From about ₹ ₹30,500 crore in 2014-15 to nearly ₹2.9 lakh crore by 2024-25.

What’s more worrying is how cards are being used. Increasingly, they are financing everyday expenses and cash-flow gaps and are no longer about convenience spending. In such a scenario, a debt trap isn’t a distant risk lurking in the corner. It’s a very real threat.

In this story, Avneet Kaur lays out practical steps borrowers can take to regain control. From understanding outstanding balances and prioritizing repayments to building disciplined financial habits that break the cycle before it spirals.

Moving away from spending, let’s talk about something many mid-career professionals quietly contemplate: a sabbatical.

The desire to take a break is real and could be for many things: To upgrade skills, explore new paths, rejuvenate, or sometimes simply respond to circumstances beyond your control. There’s nothing wrong with stepping away provided you prepare well.

Ideally, that preparation begins the day you start earning. Financial goals should be structured so that one doesn’t cannibalise another. As life evolves, priorities and timelines will shift, and your investments should adapt accordingly.

In this story, Anagh Pal offers a practical playbook to plan your break: Build a dedicated corpus, stress-test your budget, park funds in low-volatility instruments, safeguard essential outflows such as EMIs and insurance premiums, and prepare for re-entry before your cash runs dry.

And finally, coming to investments, flexi-cap funds that offer diversification across market caps are a strong recommendation by financial planners as part of your core equity portfolio. But did you know their close cousins, dividend-yield mutual funds, have outperformed flexi-cap funds over the past 3, 5, and 10 years?

Flexi-cap funds are equity schemes that invest at least 65% of their total assets in equities and equity-related instruments, with the flexibility to allocate across market caps. Dividend-yield funds follow a similar structure. They also invest a minimum of 65% in equities, but specifically in companies that pay dividends, while retaining the flexibility to invest across market caps.

So, does this mean you should pick them over flexi-cap funds? Absolutely not.

Dividend-yield funds tend to be less volatile compared to their flexi-cap cousins, given that they invest in companies that pay dividends to shareholders. This also means that while market lulls may lift their relative performance, a booming market may subdue their returns relative to flexi-caps.

In this story, Shefali Anand explains why recent outperformance alone shouldn’t drive your investment choice. Financial advisers reiterate that different strategies shine in different market cycles, and so what wins across market cycles is building a disciplined asset allocation plan.

In this week’s interview, Hemen Bhatia, executive director and chief executive officer of Angel One Asset Management Co., advocates a similar approach to passive investing as with any other long-term investing logic: Go broad and diversified. A former member of the Benchmark AMC team that pioneered passive investing in India, he argues that long-term wealth creation should be built around broad market indices rather than thematic passive funds.

Read the interview with Jash Kriplani here.

That's all for the week. Send in your feedback, story ideas, queries at deepti.bhaskaran@livemint.com.