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I don’t like negative returns on my investment. What should I do?

What to do for safe returns?

Investors are just humans and every human is a different personality. And hence, our appetite to be able to see our money go up and down might vary as well. And what we want to do with our money is a very personal decision. So it is perfectly okay if you are an investor who hates to witness the volatility that equities bring on the table. This means, that you prefer certainty in life more than the worry about whether your negative return will turn positive ever again. Basically, you are a debt investor.

Saying no to equities is fine, as long as you know the trade-offs.

  • Your returns will at best match inflation, debt instruments are unlikely to give you inflation-beating returns now and forever
  • Hence, to accumulate the amount of corpus that you may need for financial independence may necessitate you to earn more as your invested money can only work to protect your capital (in the best case scenario)
  • Debt Mutual Funds can also suffer losses in rare cases. This generally happens with funds which have high credit risk on their portfolio

But Debt Funds do come with advantages that are more in sync with your investment philosophy:

  • Returns are fairly consistent (The degree of volatility is much lower than equity)
  • Depending on the funds you select, you can have complete liquidity of capital. So you can withdraw whenever you want without any charges
  • Debt FMPs or Fixed Maturity Products which have around 3-year lock-in, provide slightly higher returns than other debt funds which do not have a lock-in. Add to that the benefit of low or negligible taxation due to indexation benefits.

At this juncture, you might be quite disappointed with the fact that there could be losses in rare situations and you still don’t get to escape volatility. You must be telling yourself a 100 times that the good old FDs are still the best solution. But hold on. Is your Fixed Deposit making you wealthier? Read here to find out.

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Is your fixed deposit making you wealthier?

Last week, I met a lawyer on my flight to Delhi. Since I had nothing better to do, I broke the ice and soon, we started discussing about my favorite topic – how do we get wealthier over the long run.

So I asked my new found lawyer friend, what does he do with his surplus funds? Immediate response – “Fixed Deposits!” So I then asked him why? And with a very perplexing look, he said – “My money grows at 6.5%. Do I need another reason?”

That is when I realized the lack of awareness that is prevalent even amongst the learned breeds of lawyers. I therefore introduced him to the concept of Debt Funds.

Debt Funds are those mutual funds which invest in debt instruments like bonds, debentures and money market instruments. But why are we comparing debt funds to fixed deposits?

Fact 1: Debt funds on an average give an annual return of 7.0% – 8.5%. SBI 1 Year Fixed Deposit yields 6.9% interest annually, and a 3 Year Fixed Deposit yields 6.50% annually.

Fact 2: If money stays invested in a debt fund for more than 3 years, then you end up paying considerably lower tax on the returns from such debt funds. This is because of the indexation benefit. Indexation implies to inflating purchase cost to account for inflation. As a result, returns which are subject to taxation is reduced. Also, such reduced returns are taxed @20%. However, in case investments are held for less than 3 years, the gains are added to the income of the investor and taxed as per the income tax slab rate applicable.

Fixed deposits are taxable as per the applicable slab rate of the investor, irrespective of the holding period of investment. That doesn’t sound good at all!

Let us understand by examples:

Consider an investor with income of INR 15lacs. He is willing to invest INR 1lac. The tax slab for this investor is 30% as per the income tax slab.

Case 1: Comparison of FD vs Debt Fund, assuming different rate of returns (as per Fact 1 above)

 

The net gain from investing in Debt funds exceeds in both the holding periods, so the investor is better off by investing in debt funds after taxes.

Due to indexation benefit, the purchase price has been inflated from ₹100,000 to ₹119,808, thereby reducing the tax liability from ₹6,238 in FD to ₹539 in debt funds. This benefit is available when the holding period is 3 years or more.

Case 2: Let us consider a scenario where returns from debt fund are the same as that of FD

An investor is better off by ₹6,051 even if the returns are same, in case holding period exceeds 3 years. Hence, debt funds are more tax efficient than fixed deposits in every scenario.

Time you think about the funds lying in your bank account?

Read More: Will Debt Funds help your create wealth?