We all dream of building a huge corpus to enjoy our post retirement life. But due to heights of laziness we think about starting from tomorrow. By the time your tomorrow arrives, your personal balance sheet will contain a home loan, a house, a car, a credit card loan and a thought for signing up for an educational loan for your child’s higher education.
Reading such a status can be quite disturbing. But that can be you in a few years from now if you do not investing from today. You can start off by listing out your financial goals into short term and long term and go about investing for financing such goals accordingly. Investing in Systematic Investment Plans(SIPs) in balanced funds will be a good start. Make sure your rate of return is more than the inflation rate so that you can save further after setting aside an amount for your post retirement needs.
If you are employed, investing in PPFs and EPFs are of primary importance. These long term debt assets provide you tax gains which no other assets can provide. So touching thse assets before they mature is a bad idea.
Once you are comfortable with your SIPs, nest step is to diversify your portfolio. Do a good market research and invest in various size caps, small cap, mid cap, large cap, hybrid cap funds etc.
The next step will be to take an insurance on your name. If your company covers your medical expenses, make sure you have a separate plan for yourself. A critical health insurance and an illness cover can comprehensively provide for your future medical expense, if any.
After you structure your portfolio, the next step is to review in which direction is your portfolio moving into. You can make any changes only if you think that a particular fund is not performing as it promised to.
Following the above steps can fulfill all your financial goals and set aside a good sum for you to enjoy your post-retirement life.