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Should I invest in Debt Funds or Equity Funds?

Which fund to choose

Both Debt and Equity Mutual Funds are thriving in the Indian Financial Market. But which one should you as an investor choose between the two?

When are Debt Funds suitable?

  • When you want to park some surplus cash for using it within 3 years
  • For creating your Emergency Fund
  • From an asset allocation perspective (when your risk appetite requires you to invest in low volatility instruments)
  • You want to invest funds for a long period of time but the safety of capital is most important (Example: Funds of your retired parents who may need it any time)
  • You have a lot of FDs on which you are paying significant taxes

When are Equity Funds suitable?

  • When you want to create a fund for a goal which is more than 5 years away
  • When you have surplus funds which you do not need to deploy in the next 5 years
  • When your preference is to generate inflation-beating returns and you think you have the ability to survive the volatility

In short, every investor should have some debt and equity components as part of the overall portfolio. For a lot of people, the debt exposure is taken care of through PF, PPF, FDs, NSCs and other such low return instruments. But for those who are investing for the first time and do not have a certain percentage of their wealth in the debt instruments, they can look to start investing in both debt and equity funds.

How does CAGRfunds help?

At CAGRfunds, we seek to make investing simple for you. So we do not clutter your mind with complicated technical financial terms. We just ask you your objectives of investments and suggest the suitable solutions to you. We believe in developing long-term relationships with our investors and hence our focus is solely on helping you meet your financial goals. For more information, feel free to contact us on +91 97693 56440 or drop us an email on contact@cagrfunds.com

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The debate between Term Insurance and Endowment Plans is finally over!

Buying Life Insurance right

Yesterday, I was scrolling through Facebook and chanced upon this really funny ad starring Akshay Kumar and Sumeet Vyas. While the deceased Sumeet pleads the new age Yamraaj (aka Akshay) to give him another life in lieu of “behen ki shaadi, beti ki padhai, ghar ka kharcha, gaadi ki EMI”, he is asked a very simple yet daunting question – “Term Insurance nahi liya tumne?” To which comes the aptest reply – “Bhul Gaya”.

Term Insurance

See the ad here

I did some research and the statistics shocked me. Although the insurance industry in India is growing at a fast pace, only 4% of our population has insurance coverage. Which means that 96 out of every 100 people have not safeguarded their dependents in an unfortunate eventuality of their death. I shudder to think of a family where the father is the sole bread earner and should anything happen to him, what was to be the future of his wife and kids. Add to that, cases where several liabilities in the form of a home loan, vehicle loan etc. are ongoing. Indeed, our priorities are completely misplaced.

But let us not blame the tendency to procrastinate as the only driver behind the low penetration. While a lot of people understand the importance of Term Insurance, they often struggle to figure out which plan is apt for them.

So I decided to do a mini survey. I went around asking 22 of my neighbours as to what had they done about Life Insurance? Well, 6 of them had not thought about it, 8 of them had thought but

got confused between the available options, 7 of them were covered by Endowment Plans and ULIPs and only 1 person was covered by a Term Insurance Plan.

Let me try and focus on the people who are covered or the ones who are thinking about coverage but are not fully aware of all the alternatives. Therefore, let us first understand what Endowment Plans and Term Insurances are.

Endowment Plans

Endowment plans, a bulk of which are sold by LIC, are a mix of Insurance and Investment. This means that you get some life insurance coverage in exchange for an annual or quarterly premium and after a certain maturity period, you get your premiums back, and maybe some bonus amount. That sounds quite appealing. You get back what you pay for. So you get insurance for free!

That is the pitch that agents make to us and like 11 out of 10 people, we scamper for anything and everything that is marked as “FREE”. Let us analyze them in more details a little later.

Term Insurance

Term Insurance is pure insurance. You pay only what is required to pay for Insurance. In case of death, the nominees get the full insured value. But you get nothing for staying alive.

Why are we even talking about Term Insurance then?

Let us see a small comparison.

Endowment Plan Term Insurance
Insurance Cover 1,00,00,000 1,00,00,000
Policy Period 30 years 30 years
Annual Premium 3,24,734 8,279
Total Amount Paid 97.4 lacs 2.5 lacs

Note: The above details are for a 30 year old, male, non-smoker.

Term Insurance Benefit 1: You pay only for Insurance, the cost of which is quite low. When compared to an Endowment Plan, everything being paid over and above the cost of Insurance is either getting allocated towards charges or are being invested.

Now when you are paying for investment, you ideally should also expect some return on the money getting invested. Historically, Endowment Plans have not given more than 4-6% annual returns. And this is true for a period when Fixed Deposits in Bank were giving around 7-8% annual returns and equity surpassed 15-16% annual returns. So basically, had you taken a plain Term Insurance and left the remaining money as a fixed deposit every year, you would have still made more money than your Endowment Plan did.

Therefore, Term Insurance Benefit 2: You can separate your investment objective and get better returns by following the right investment strategy.

So what do people do?

In most cases, we do not witness people taking an endowment plan with an insurance coverage of more than 10-20 lacs. This is because, for a vast majority of the middle class, an annual premium of approximately 50-70K towards insurance is a big amount. And if this is true, then let us revisit our objective of Insurance. If something were to happen to the bread earner of the family today, will a Life Insurance coverage of 10-20 lacs be sufficient to safeguard the family? In most cases, that is highly unlikely.

So, Term insurance Benefit 3: Get adequate coverage for a low premium.

But if that is so straightforward, why don’t people take Term Insurance?

  • Comfort with familiarity: A lot of people have seen their parents and grandparents taking endowment plans. It feels like home to them. Change results in resistance.
  • Affinity for “FREE”: We seldom do the math to figure out how much are we giving up over a period of time to get something for free now. Endowment Plans demand much higher premiums as compared to term Insurance but at some point in time, we get it all back. However, what we do not take into account is the time value for money. A 4-6% return over premiums paid is essentially capital destroyed. With that kind of return, you really did not generate any additional wealth, thereby defeating the whole concept of investing.
  • Dislike for “Expense”: We don’t like anything that we don’t get back. Term Insurance premiums albeit low are an expense. If we don’t die, we don’t get back anything. And this is one of the most prevalent reasons why people stay away from Term Insurance. Even though it makes no logical sense for them to manage their hard earned money in this way. If you want to experience this in real, next time someone sells you an Endowment Policy, ask him or her the annual return that you will make.

Our Recommendation:

Insurance shouldn’t be used as an investment vehicle. One should always go for a plain vanilla Term Insurance Policy and plan out his investments separately. Mixing the two creates a lack of transparency towards allocation to charges and leads to lower potential returns.

If you have any further queries, feel free to call us on +91 9769356440 or email us at contact@cagrfunds.com .

 

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How compound interest can make you wealthy!

Power of copounding

You must have heard the phrase, “…with a cherry on top!” That would be what compound interest does for your money, and more. A relatively easy topic that we all covered in our tenth-grade mathematics. However, few of us managed to unravel the wonders that lie within its very basic formula.

Compound Interest is earning an interest on your interest. When your money is being compounded, you will earn money on your principal amount as well as the interest that has been earned previously. Let us see a small comparison between Simple Interest and Compound Interest.

As we can see, an investment that is being compounded annually at 12% over 20 years gives 3 times as much returns than an investment that gives a simple interest of 12% over the same period.

Like wine, compound interest is truly enjoyed by those who give it the time to get older, and thus better. To further elaborate on this comparison, let me present to you a small story, proving yet again how time is wealth.

Let’s meet two friends, Ramesh and Suresh. Both are twenty years old and have just graduated from their college. Ramesh decides that he will invest 1,000 rupees every month for his retirement. He starts investing immediately in a pension scheme. Suresh sees this and takes Ramesh for a fool as there are still 40 years left for their retirement!

Ten years later, Suresh sees that Ramesh’s corpus has grown to 2.6 lakhs! Suresh starts investing 2,000 rupees per month for his retirement to catch up with Ramesh’s investments.

Now, they have both reached retirement. Let us see how their investments have performed.

As we can see, Ramesh has invested a lesser amount over the same period. However, he has earned 10 lakhs more than Suresh. This is because the money that goes in early does the major work for your investment. Read on to find out why we say “Start Small But Start Early”.

Therefore, it’s not timing the market. It is time in the market!

So, invest early and let the magic of compounding do its job.

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Who will be paying for your old age?

happy retirement

Shrivastava uncle is 72 and his wife, Manjula aunty is 68. They are my next door neighbours. Extremely sweet and affectionate, they love to talk. They have three kids – all married and employed. Uncle himself was a tax consultant till a few years back. As he grew older, his ability to work 8 hours a day and scout for new clients declined. His existing client base who was also largely retired did not need his services anymore. Aunty is a quintessential homemaker, devoted to the family ever since she was married to uncle. To me, they are a classic representation of the vast majority of our retired parental generation in India.

Last Sunday we met over tea and aunty made some delicious pakodas. As I noted down her recipe, uncle advised me to go slow on fried food. Two reasons – rising oil prices and rising healthcare costs. He said, the joy of fried food is “not worth it”.

Uncle and aunty had always lived a middle class lifestyle. Moderate income with significant monetary commitments towards their children. They wanted their children to get the best of education. But they had not fathomed the kind of money they would need to shell out just for schooling and tuitions, let apart the cost of higher education. So every child ended up taking a loan for pursuing their masters / post – graduation. They bought a home early in life and the EMIs continued till after their second child got married. And for all of his working 35 years, uncle’s sole intention was to save enough for getting his three kids married off in style. But with rising costs of the pomp and show of marriage, his fixed deposits were not enough. So he ended up withdrawing his PF and PPF – because it is so much more fulfilling to walk your chin up in the society than leading a comfortable retired life. So now, they have a handful of savings, minimal passive income and no monthly inflows. They definitely do not live the way they would have liked to.

I sometimes asked them why their children could not send him a monthly cheque so that they did not have to cut down on their lifestyle. They never really answered but I knew that like most parents of their generation, they always wanted to be a giver to their children. It was a matter of self – esteem to not depend on the ones you have raised. Sometimes, uncle used to say that his children need to save for their own retirement, not his. I have met his children – they are very nice people. They visit their parents often and want to help them. But they do not help because they cannot see their father feel dejected at the reality of having to depend on children.

This predicament is not unusual in our current social fabric. Some children don’t care about their parents. For those that do, the parents don’t want to be termed as dependents. It is an eternal sense of insecurity that lingers once the monthly inflow stops. The eventualities are something no one really plans for. Cost of living rises in ways we don’t visualize well in advance. We need to outsource daily chores more than we have ever had to and healthcare constitutes a big chunk of monthly expenses. Since there is so much more free time in a day, the desire to have a social life also increases. The costs of upkeep of that social life varies from household to household.

In India, we do focus on saving for our child’s marriage and may be also education. But retirement was and still is missing from the list of priority financial objectives. To our generation who has just started out on their long careers, retirement seems just too far off. And we hate to look that ahead in time. Some of my friends jokingly retort – who knows if we will be living till then. Well, the mortality rates have definitely gone up.

Some people believe that purchasing a house is all that they need for retirement. But what about the daily cash-flows? The salaries you need to pay to the domestic helpers, the driver and the newspaper man. The rising expenses on milk and flour. The medicines. The gifts that you want to give to your grand- children. We hardly plan for a life which is perhaps going to be so different from what we are currently living. And by the time we do, it is usually too late.

Let us therefore awaken and become more responsible, starting with ourselves. Next time, before you start planning for your child’s graduation expenditure, do set aside a sum for your happy retirement. It is alarmingly more important than you think it is.

About the author:

Shruti is a financial planning enthusiast and spends substantial amount of her free time in helping out her friends and relatives sorting out their finances. Currently working with Mahindra & Mahindra, she is one of our esteemed guest writers. She is an MBA from MDI Gurgaon and a CFA (CFA Institute, USA). 

About CAGRfunds:

We are a bunch of financial experts who help people manage and grow their wealth. We focus on making our clients financially independent by educating them and guiding them throughout their financial journey. If you think you need help with your money, reach out to us on +91 97693 56440.