Yes..You read it right. You can save tax upto Rs. 13,015 per annum and increase your take home by Rs. 1084 per month if you use food coupons.

Food coupons are nothing but plain vouchers given by organisations to employees to have a meal at your convenience. The two big companies that issue such coupons are SodexHo and Ticket Restaurant. [More]

This is a most common question that comes up in mind when you see the HRA component in your salary and want to maximise tax benefit. Well, there are three rules which determine the cap on the HRA tax exemption that you would get.

We have created a simple Calculator to calculate optimum rent for maximum tax exemption limit which takes care of all the above points and gives you the optimum value that should be paid as rent. [More]

The only substantial change is the increase in standard deduction of Rs. 20000 (from 1,60,000 to 1,80,000) for males. There are no favors done for females and they would be getting the same amount of standard deduction i.e. 1,90,000.

The net effect of this rebate is the increase of Rs. 172 in male tax payer's monthly in-hand salary. For females, the take home pay remains same. [More]