Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Compute future costs to ensure you save enough

Compute future costs to ensure you save enough


Parents always seek to provide the best for their child when it comes to education and marriage. But one should accept the fact that the best is always expensive. So you should keep in mind that to provide your children the best of education and a lavish marriage, financial planning could play a crucial role. There are six easy steps to put in place a strong financial plan for your child. These are: 
 
Start early
While planning for your children, start early . So you will have a longer time horizon to create an adequate corpus.Early planning will not only give you peace of mind but will also ensure that your children have the opportunities that you have envisioned for them.

Calculate future spends
Currently, the cost of education and marriage are rising faster than consumer inflation. So, it's important to determine current cost of education and marriage expense then inflate with at least 10% every year till the year of the goal's achievement.

Save every month
Identify monthly investments required after linking your current insurance policies and investments with children's goals. These are long term goals so you need to have a disciplined approach for the next 15-20 years. The advantages of investing early are the advantages of compounding and the chance to ride out volatility of different market cycles in the long run.

Have right asset allocation
Before investments, identify your risk appetite by taking an online risk profile test.This determines an ideal portfolio mix considering past experience with investments, current age and expectations from investments. At an early age, your investment portfolio should give more weight to equities since over the long term it has the potential to generate higher nominal returns compared to other asset classes and inflation cost. As the goal year comes closer, your investments in equity should be reduced and when you reach to goal year portfolio should be 100% into debt schemes.We feel balance funds category is the best mutual fund category to plan for chil dren's financial goal.

Adequate life cover
It's important to have adequate life cover of the main earner in the family. The cover should have a sum assurance which covers the current liability and expenses of the children's goals at current value. In case of any eventuality, your children's future will not be affected because of financial reasons.You should consider online term plans for adequate life cover at an early age.

Review your plan
You must review your investments at regular intervals with advice from financial planner.A review is done to know whether your investments are giving expected rate of returns.Timely review on a regular basis helps to diversify and change investment strategies during slowdownexcessive growth in the economy .

Conclusion
A financial plan won't make any sense until it's executed and investments are reviewed on regular basis. Thus, make sure you appoint a financial planner who handholds to identify the present cost for children goals, recommend investments to build a corpus by understanding the risk appetite and also help you in reviewing it regularly .
The writer is founder & director , TBNG Capital Advisors




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