Ask Money Today: Are index funds good for long term goals investment?

I am 32, salaried. My dependents are son (2 years), wife (25 years), mother (55 years) and father (65 years). I am drawing a monthly salary of Rs 58,000. My provident fund contribution is Rs 4,000 per month and PPF contribution is Rs 500 annually. I have a term insurance policy HDFC Click2Protect worth Rs 50 lakh. I have a health insurance policy - Star Health Family Optima worth Rs 6 lakh. I have kept an emergency fund of Rs 2 lakh in SBI savings with auto sweep option. I have invested Rs 97,000 in the ELSS scheme of Mirae Asset Mutual Fund. I also invest Rs 33,000 per month in UTI Nifty Index Fund- direct plan-growth option. The current valuation of my equity portfolio is Rs 10 lakh. My debt fund portfolio is Rs 4.55 lakh.

My goals are retirement (in 2048) and child higher education (in 2037). Am I on the right investment path? Kindly suggest any changes. Is this much investment fine or do I need to invest more for my goals stated above.

-Santu Mondal

By Raghvendra Nath, MD, Ladderup Wealth Management

Goal based investing is the most apt way to look at your portfolio. Your investments should be aligned in such a way that they can take care of your goals whenever they are due. At current SIP, you will have a corpus of ~41 lakhs for your child's higher education by 2037 and ~ Rs 8 crore of retirement corpus by 2048. With a retirement corpus of this size, it can easily take care of your monthly expenses of more than Rs 1 lakh. You seem to be on the right path to achieve your stated goals. Since you have 27 years ahead of you for your retirement, a decent SIP of Rs 33,000 can end up with massive results. Though, remember consistency and perseverance is the key. Also a more diversified approach would be to allocate the investments across market capitalisation as exposure to a single fund would be a risk. You can have a 70-20-10 allocation to large mid and small caps which would help with the investment mix, also you should look at adding exposure to actively managed funds as indices generally only outperform the broader markets during corrections.

(Views expressed by the investment expert are his/her own. E-mail us your investment queries at askmoneytoday@intoday.com. We will get your queries answered by our panel of experts.)

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