Everything in Indian life that quietly expires.

The five most commonly missed

If you read nothing else, read this. In rough order of how often they catch people:

1. The own-damage half of a new vehicle's insurance — the third-party cover runs three or five years, the part that repairs your own vehicle runs one.
2. PPF's ₹500 a year — miss it and the account is discontinued until you pay a penalty for every year skipped.
3. An annual subscription — twelve months is long enough to forget you ever decided.
4. The second PUC — a new vehicle gets a year, then it drops to six months, and nobody is told.
5. FASTag re-KYC — it fails at a toll plaza, which is the worst possible place to discover it.

Vehicle

Covered properly in the vehicle guide — two of these are criminal offences to be caught without, and one deletes years of accumulated discount if you are ninety-one days late.

• Third-party insurance — 1 year, or 3 (new car) / 5 (new two-wheeler). Fine of ₹2,000 rising to ₹4,000.
• Own-damage cover — 1 year, always, regardless of the above.
• PUC certificate — 6 months, 1 year when new. ₹10,000.
• Registration certificate — 15 years, then 5-year terms.
• Driving licence — 20 years or until you turn 40, whichever is first.
• FASTag KYC — periodic, and only visible in the issuing bank's app.

Insurance and health

• Health insurance premium — annual. A lapse can cost you the waiting periods you have already served, which are worth more than the premium.
• Term life premium — annual, quarterly or monthly. Insurers allow a grace period; past it the policy lapses and reviving it may need fresh medicals.
• Employer cover ending — leaving a job ends group health cover, usually immediately. Worth a reminder set to the last working day, not discovered afterwards.
• Cashless card and network hospital lists — these change; the hospital you assumed was covered may not be next year.
• Preventive health check-ups — many policies include one free annually and it silently does not carry forward.

Money and accounts

The quietest group, because nothing bounces and nobody calls. Several of these penalise inactivity rather than lateness.

• PPF minimum deposit — ₹500 in each financial year. Miss it and the account is treated as discontinued: to revive it you pay ₹500 for each year missed plus a ₹50 penalty per year. It cannot be revived after maturity.
• NPS Tier-I minimum — ₹1,000 in a financial year keeps the account active. Tier-II asks ₹250.
• Sukanya Samriddhi minimum — an annual deposit is required to keep the account regular.
• Fixed deposit maturity — auto-renewal at whatever rate applies that day is the default at many banks, which is rarely the rate you would have chosen.
• Bank locker rent — usually annual, usually auto-debited, and the agreement itself is periodically renewed.
• Dormant accounts — an account with no customer-initiated transaction for around two years is typically classed inoperative, and reactivating it means fresh KYC.
• Credit card annual fee — and, more usefully, the spend threshold that waives it, which resets each year.
• Reward points and air miles — almost all expire, often silently.
• Advance tax instalments — quarterly, with interest for missing them.

Identity and government

• Passport — 10 years for an adult, 5 for a minor. Many countries want six months' validity remaining at entry, so the real deadline is six months before the printed one.
• Visas and permits — including the validity of a residence permit, not just the visa.
• Driving licence — as above.
• PAN and Aadhaar linkage — deadlines here have moved repeatedly; an unlinked PAN can become inoperative.
• Aadhaar document update — periodically requested for records that have gone stale.
• Police clearance and attestation certificates — often accepted only within six months of issue.
• Professional licences and CPE requirements — annual for many regulated professions.

Home and the things in it

• Extended warranties — the one people buy and then never note the end date of. Usually the same day of the month, one to three years out.
• Manufacturer warranty — one or two years, and the receipt is normally required. Keep it with the date.
• AMCs — air conditioning, water purifier, lift, inverter. Typically annual, and typically renewed only when something breaks.
• Water purifier filter changes — by months or by litres, whichever comes first.
• Rent agreement — 11 months is the common term, precisely so it falls outside registration requirements. The renewal date arrives faster than a year suggests.
• Society maintenance and property tax — quarterly or annual, with interest for delay.
• Home insurance — annual, and frequently allowed to lapse after the first year.
• LPG connection KYC — periodically re-requested; subsidy stops without it.
• Fire extinguisher and gas pipe replacement — both have dates printed on them that nobody reads.

Digital and work

• Domain names — annual, and the single most expensive thing on this list to recover late. A lapsed domain can be bought by anyone.
• SSL certificates and hosting — annual or shorter.
• Cloud storage plans — and the quiet consequence: exceed the free tier after a lapse and new backups simply stop.
• App and OTT subscriptions — see the subscriptions guide; most people find two they had entirely forgotten.
• Software licences and developer accounts — an Apple Developer account lapse pulls your apps from the store.
• Professional certifications — AWS, PMP, and most others expire in two to three years.
• Gym and club memberships — usually auto-renewing.
• Passwords and API keys with rotation policies — at work, someone else's problem until it is yours.

How to do this once, properly

Do not try to do all forty. Almost nobody has all of them, and a list you abandon halfway is worse than no list.

1. Write down the ones you know. Ten minutes, from memory. This catches most of the value.
2. Then search your email for renews on, expires, receipt and auto-debit, sorted oldest first. This catches the ones you had forgotten.
3. Set the reminder early, not on the day. Thirty days for anything involving an insurer, fifteen for anything involving a queue, sixty for anything involving a government office.
4. Keep the document with the date. The policy PDF is only ever needed at the moment you cannot find it.
5. Put a single annual review in the calendar. One afternoon a year, ideally in the first week of April so the financial-year items land in the same pass.

Where you keep the list genuinely does not matter — a spreadsheet, a calendar, a notebook. What matters is that it exists and that the reminder arrives with enough room to act on it.