Hi, I am Rajan Dhawan, 38, married to a dentist and father of a 5-year-old son. My parents are also living with me.
I am working as a District Manager in a government-backed e-Governance project. I am earning 60,000 per month.
I have some dreams like any man of the middle class, such as purchasing a new house and traveling to new locations. I believe long-term passive income from investments is the best way to achieve my dreams.
Life is not all about achieving dreams, but life is also about fulfilling some responsibilities. My major responsibilities are making sure my son gets a good education, saving up for his future wedding and taking care of my dependent parents.
I was never serious about money as life was going well. That all changed when my father got two heart attacks within a short time span. The treatment took a big chunk of our savings and we were suddenly faced with financial insecurity.
At that moment I realized my biggest personal finance mistake of not having health & life insurance. 60k monthly salary & 3-4 lakh savings is never going to be enough to cover any medical care needed for any person in my family.
And, what if, something would happen to me? Who will take care of my family? That thought made me numb.
I took one medical insurance policy for my parents, and one for me, my wife & my son. I also took 1 crore term insurance for myself as I am the sole bread earner in the family.
It gave me a sense of relief of confronting any unforeseen health & life emergencies.
I also discovered that a fixed deposit won’t reach my long-term financial goals. I can probably beat inflation with fixed deposits but wealth creation is not possible.
I read blogs, watched youtube videos, and spoke with a few so-called traditional financial advisors.
I called my known LIC agent and asked if he can suggest to me some investment options apart from my regular LIC plans going on. He advised me to invest in ULIP where he promised a handsome annual return along with life cover.
But I was not satisfied with his promises as nothing was on paper and he didn’t provide any historical information about the returns he was promising.
I searched further and I saw a wide range of investment options that baffled me completely. Every investment option has its own nature to fulfill a specific type of investment goal.
We need to specify our goals before starting the investment. I divided the various investment options into different categories
- Up to 2 month expense – Savings account
- Easy investment options (that most of us know) – FD, Gold, Post office schemes
- Emergency fund – FD, liquid funds
- Short-term goals (up to 1 year) – RD
- Government options – Sukanaya Smariddhi Yojna, Kisaan Vikaas Patra, Bonds
- Investment options for Retirement corpus – NPS, PPF, and EPF
- Popular For Wealth creation – stocks, mutual funds
- Famous but complex – Real estate, Cryptocurrency
- Complex and less famous – index funds, ETFs, debt funds, and Crypto, debentures, SGBs
I decided to first learn investing diligently and then start my investment journey. At the same time, InvestingExpert is born.