I’m 42 and don’t have a job. I have Rs 53 lakh in savings. How can I save for my daughter and manage daily expenses?

I am 42 years old. I worked as an engineer, but due to family circumstances, I had to leave my job. I have Rs 35 lakh as a fixed deposit, Rs 8 lakh in PPF account, Rs 10 lakh in mutual fund and ULIP plan. I have monthly expenses of Rs 15,000–18,000 right now. How can I manage my monthly expenses without disturbing my corpus money? And, I have a 10-year-old daughter. How can I manage education and marriage expenses? 

Rakesh Ranjan 

Reply by Sushil Jain, CEO, PersonalCFO.in 

Since you left your job to support your family, your cash inflow has temporarily stopped. However, it’s important to remain patient and find ways to manage your finances with the available resources.

Our principal of managing wealth is: create wealth, protect wealth, create wealth from wealth.

At this point, you are not in a position to create wealth, but we advise you to find a suitable job in which you can support your family along with your work like work from home, freelancing or consultancy in your field.

You should plan to protect wealth as well as create wealth from wealth along with managing regular inflow as well as financial goals like child education and marriage. Following strategy will help you in this:

For protecting wealth, you should have adequate health and life insurance. Apart from this you should have household insurance, accidental insurance and critical illness cover. As you know insurance will indemnify your loss from unexpected events, by this way it will protect your wealth.

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Once you adequately protect yourself, your family and your wealth, now you should focus on creating regular cash flow and create wealth from your wealth. You should switch your fixed deposit to a mutual fund which will give you a tax efficient return with liquidity and flexibility. It also provides you a positive return after inflation in the long run which helps you to grow your wealth along with your regular expenses.

Your portfolio should be as follows:

Rs 2 lakh in saving bank as emergency fund
Rs 8 lakh keep in PPF which give you tax free assured return with debt allocation
Rs 43 lakh in diversify mutual funds
For monthly expenses you should opt for a Systematic withdrawal plan of Rs. 15,000 from Mutual fund.

Despite monthly withdrawal you will have sufficient money for your daughter's education and marriage. Before considering any scheme to execute above plan, you should do your risk profiling and suitability. We strongly recommend you to take advice from a qualified financial planner like CFP, RIA for risk profiling and scheme selection.

Last but not least, you must have a will so that your wealth is distributed as per your will.

(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.)