Financial Planning. Financial planning for a family of 4

Sankaran (42) and his wife Revathi (39), parents of 2 children, work in the IT industry. They want a financial plan to achieve their goals in future. They had prioritised their key goals as follows.

1. Education fund for kids, aged 9 and 4.

2. House at the earliest, preferably a 3-BHK in Chennai at a cost of ₹1.2 crore

3. Investing for retirement

4. New car at an additional cost of ₹8 lakh in 2022

5. Protection of family from unfortunate events

The family’s cash flow and assets are as follows:

All the investments in real estate were made based on third party compulsion in the last 4 to 5 years. They had not seen their assets appreciate considerably. They had sought unit-linked insurance policies on the assumption that they were investing in mutual funds. They had started to invest in mutual funds two to three years ago. With home loan interest rates at attractive levels and surplus cash available in hand, the couple wanted to buy a house.

Sankaran did not exhibit confidence of getting any substantial increase in his salary in the coming years. Revathi was comfortable continuing with her employment.

We reviewed their investments and recommended the following.

a) Build up ₹ 6 lakh towards an emergency fund

b) Set up protection by buying term insurance for Sankaran for a sum assured of ₹1 crore and Revathi for ₹1 crore without riders.

c) Buying health insurance for the family for a sum insured of ₹10 lakh. Though the family is covered for medical emergencies through employer-provided group insurance, these covers had many restrictions along with low sum insured. The health cover was also insufficient considering their life style

d) Keep track of spending for the next one year to ascertain their actual monthly expenses. The expenses may have come down because of the Covid lockdown and that they could go back to their old spending habits once life returned to normal.

e) Restructure their holdings in unit-linked insurance plans within the next one year, mainly to reduce the annual commitment. This would reduce the premium commitments from ₹ 6 lakh per annum to ₹1 lakh per annum

f) Sell two of their plots of land to partially fund the house purchase, so that their leverage could be restricted and an unproductive asset monetised. This would help them to buy a house for ₹1.2 crore while also restricting the loan component to ₹60-70 lakh.

With adequate contingency measures in place, reduced premium commitments and surplus available as cash, they were better placed to service the housing loan without additional financial burden. They were also advised to reduce expenses wherever possible to foreclose the loan in the next 8 to 10 years.

Education goal

Towards elder son’s education, they would require about ₹35 lakh in the next nine years. They would also require ₹57 lakh for the younger son’s education. (Current cost for education is presumed at ₹15 lakh with inflation assumed at 10 per cent).

At 11 per cent expected return, they would need to invest ₹14,000 and ₹16,000 per month in large-cap mutual funds to fund these two education goals.

Retirement goal

We recommended that they invest ₹25,000 in large-cap mutual funds towards their retirement corpus. With an expected return of 11 per cent over the next 20 years, they would be able to achieve a corpus of ₹2.16 crore. Along with regular PF and NPS accumulations that they were making, they should be able to reach a sizeable corpus towards retirement.

Other facets

To become successful investors, we encouraged them to keep an ‘Investing Behaviour Journal’ to keep a record of their emotions as and when there were wild swings in the markets either up or down.

The writer, Co-founder of Chamomile Investment Consultants in Chennai, is an investment advisor registered with SEBI

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