The Asian Age

YOU CAN PLAN TO BECOME CROREPATI

- Adhil Shetty

Becoming a crorepati is not an impossible dream. Through discipline­d investing and the power of compounded growth, you can create a corpus of your first crore in a few years. Discipline­d investing is important not just from the point of view of creating wealth, but also from fulfilling the needs to protect you from inflation and for your sustenance in retirement.

DON’T BE DAUNTED BY LARGE TARGET

It’s easy to be daunted by the idea of owning a crore rupees someday. You may look at your income today along with your expenses and think there is no way to set aside enough money for achieving this target. But that’s where you are mistaken. With systematic investment­s of a few thousand rupees every month, and given enough time, you can achieve this mammoth target. If you invest `11,000 a month in a mutual fund with a CAGR of 12 per cent, you wll hit your target in 20 years.

WHERE TO INVEST

Some investment­s are better suited for longterm wealth creation than others. Fixed deposits, for example, keep your money safe but are not tax-efficient and offer only modest returns and so they are not suited for this objective. For long-term wealth creation targets, you must use an instrument-or a combinatio­n of instrument­s that can achieve the target in an optimal time-span while costing you the least money. In this regard, equity mutual fund SIPs and equity investing could be your best options. Over the long term, these have outperform­ed even small savings schemes such as PPF. As per the Crisil AMFI Equity Fund Performanc­e for June 2017, the equity mutual fund category has a CAGR or 11.56 per cent in the last 10 years, and 17.82 per cent in the last five. The fact that you don’t get taxed for long-term equity investment­s mean that you can achieve your wealth targets quicker.

Pro tip: When investing in mutual funds for the long term, pick direct plans which have lower expense ratios. This could save you several lakh rupees in the future.

STEP UP YOUR INVESTMENT­S

With time, your income will increase. This will allow you to invest higher amounts with each passing year. Let’s say you start investing `5,000 a month today. With every passing year, you increase your contributi­on by 10 per cent, taking it to `5,500 in the second year, to `11,800 in the 10th, to `30,500 in the 20th. These numbers seem large now. But gradually stepping up investment­s in sync with your income would help you achieve

bigger targets.

LASTLY, WATCH THE INFLATION

While chasing any financial target, it’s important to contextual­ise it. A crore rupees today is a big amount. However, assuming an inflation rate of about seven per cent every year, the value of the rupee halves after every 10 years or so. So, for example, `1,000 in 2007 is the same as `2,065 in 2017, assuming an average rate of inflation of 7.57 per cent in this period. If the same inflation rate persists, `1 crore in 20 years would be worth less than `25 lakh today. So not only must your investment target be ambitious, it must also be in tune with future money needs.

BECOMING A CROREPATI IS A DREAM THAT EVERY MIDDLE-CLASS PERSON HAS, BUT MANY THINK THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. HERE IS A PLAN TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE IT.

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