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How does CAGRfunds charge zero to its customers?

At CAGRfunds, we help you to invest in “Regular Plans” of Mutual Funds. As such, we earn commissions from the AMCs (Asset Management Companies) based on the value of investments that we facilitate.  The commissions that we get are just one of the many components of the “Expense Ratios” of the funds. Since we get our revenues through commissions, we do not charge our clients anything.

Why we deserve what we earn?

First things first. There are no free lunches. So next time someone gives you free advice (for no consideration whatsoever) be extremely careful about betting your money on advice that has no ownership.

Expense ratios are essentially a part of earnings that are deployed towards fund expenses. Since our commissions are a part of it, we feel extremely responsible to add enough value to justify our revenues. Following is how we consistently add value to our clients:

Behavioural education – We believe that investing is more about your inherent behaviour and less about identifying the “best funds”. As normal people who are not rational at all points in time, we tend to take misguided decisions when it comes to money. Most investors often wonder when is the right time to sell as soon as markets start getting volatile. Therefore, we spend a huge amount of time educating our clients about various aspects of investing, inherent biases that they should be avoiding, the correct approach and the ideal way to plan. Throughout your investment journey, there will be times when you will need expert guidance about what action or decision they should take (A lot of our existing clients call us to ask if they should purchase XYZ policy that their bank RM has been pushing them for). And that is where we step in. So while, our very simple platform takes care of executing your transactions, we proactively take care of every small action that remains to be a humanised and personalized service. We strive to be the financial partners of our clients throughout their investment journey. We believe in being approachable and responsive to their requirements. Indeed, a human voice and a face to talk to always helps.

Customized fund recommendation – We understand that each person has different needs, objectives and preferences. Since we do not offer any standardized algorithms, our fund recommendation is purely customized to your suitability. With us, you, therefore, do not run the risk of being misguided by fund rankings and recent returns. This is extremely crucial as your objective is to meet your financial goals by investing in the most suitable funds.

Asset Allocation and rebalancing: At the start of any investment, we put down the target asset allocation of the investor. This target allocation depends on the age, investment objectives and risk profile of the investor. At the end of every year, we compare the target allocation with the current asset allocation and recommend a suitable action. The investor can either choose to follow the recommendation or set a new asset allocation target. In addition, we also proactively suggest any changes that may be required in your portfolio due to fundamental changes in fund attributes (For example, a change in fund manager may have a considerable impact on the future performance of the fund). We, therefore, spend a lot of time reviewing each portfolio in the utmost details. We, therefore, ensure that your money is optimally invested at all times.

Tax Planning: We help our investors with tax planning in multiple ways

  1. Recommend the most suitable tax saving mutual funds under section 80C
  2. Comprehensive Tax Reports which inform the investor what proportion of his corpus has become tax-free and what proportion is liable to taxation. This comes extremely handy at the time of filing returns as investors prefer a ready reckoner of what is their tax liability
  3. Notification of tax liability on redemption (Coming Soon): Often times, investors tend to redeem funds oblivious to the tax liability it creates. We have therefore started intimating our investors on whether their redemption amount is subject to taxation or not. This is extremely helpful when there are tax-free avenues for redemption which can be utilized first
  4. NPS Account opening and investment
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I don’t like negative returns on my investment. What should I do?

What to do for safe returns?

Investors are just humans and every human is a different personality. And hence, our appetite to be able to see our money go up and down might vary as well. And what we want to do with our money is a very personal decision. So it is perfectly okay if you are an investor who hates to witness the volatility that equities bring on the table. This means, that you prefer certainty in life more than the worry about whether your negative return will turn positive ever again. Basically, you are a debt investor.

Saying no to equities is fine, as long as you know the trade-offs.

  • Your returns will at best match inflation, debt instruments are unlikely to give you inflation-beating returns now and forever
  • Hence, to accumulate the amount of corpus that you may need for financial independence may necessitate you to earn more as your invested money can only work to protect your capital (in the best case scenario)
  • Debt Mutual Funds can also suffer losses in rare cases. This generally happens with funds which have high credit risk on their portfolio

But Debt Funds do come with advantages that are more in sync with your investment philosophy:

  • Returns are fairly consistent (The degree of volatility is much lower than equity)
  • Depending on the funds you select, you can have complete liquidity of capital. So you can withdraw whenever you want without any charges
  • Debt FMPs or Fixed Maturity Products which have around 3-year lock-in, provide slightly higher returns than other debt funds which do not have a lock-in. Add to that the benefit of low or negligible taxation due to indexation benefits.

At this juncture, you might be quite disappointed with the fact that there could be losses in rare situations and you still don’t get to escape volatility. You must be telling yourself a 100 times that the good old FDs are still the best solution. But hold on. Is your Fixed Deposit making you wealthier? Read here to find out.

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Will Debt Funds help you create wealth?

debt fund and wealth creation

Debt funds are good investment vehicles to protect your capital and still earn more than your bank interest, but they may not sufficient to help you generate enough wealth to achieve financial independence.

Let us understand this by an example.

Assumptions:

  1. A 30-year-old salaried employee has a current monthly income of INR 1.5 Lacs
  2. Annual Salary increment: 8%
  3. Annual Expenses: INR 1.15 lacs (Rent: 60K, Grocery: 20K, Child Education: 20K, Medical: 5K and Travel: 10K). The inflation rate for each is as follows: Grocery: 6% | Rental: 10% | Medical: 12% | Education: 10%
  4. The balance is saved in a combination of debt instruments which give the returns as follows: PPF: 7.6% | Bank Savings: 3.5% | Debt Funds: 7.0%
  5. The weighted average rate of return is around 6.7% annually
  6. Annual compounding of returns assumed
  7. Assumed no taxes on gains on investment

So let us see how your expenses increase for the next 30 years vis-à-vis your debt investments.

When will you run out of money?

As you can see, your expenses will outlive your income from Year 22 onwards and that is when you will start dipping into your debt savings which will start declining thereon. And this happens while you are still working. You can well imagine what should happen once your recurring income drops or becomes negligible post your retirement.

We often ignore the impact of inflation on our lives and hence, the above is a very common “kahaani ghar ghar ki”. Therefore, even in the best case scenario, debt funds will perhaps help us match inflation but not create additional wealth that can make us live through our retirement comfortably. And this is the reason the majority of retired or nearly retired Indians are working out of compulsion. A lot of such people would have ideally wanted to spend their time reading or travelling or just basking under the sun on a chilly winter morning. But even after 40 years of working, they are striving to make ends meet just because our normal income flow cannot live up to the increase in expenses.

We, therefore, need to invest our savings in instruments which can considerably beat inflation. This is where equity comes into play. You may not like it but you may still have to consider it for a comfortable future. However, equity is a challenging subject for most and we tend to have an increased the fear of loss because of our own lack of understanding of which funds to invest in. Therefore, for a person who is new to equity investing, choosing the SIP mode of investing through a trusted advisor is the best route to choose.

But then why do people still invest in Debt? And where exactly should you be investing? Read here to find more.

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Should I invest in Debt Funds or Equity Funds?

Which fund to choose

Both Debt and Equity Mutual Funds are thriving in the Indian Financial Market. But which one should you as an investor choose between the two?

When are Debt Funds suitable?

  • When you want to park some surplus cash for using it within 3 years
  • For creating your Emergency Fund
  • From an asset allocation perspective (when your risk appetite requires you to invest in low volatility instruments)
  • You want to invest funds for a long period of time but the safety of capital is most important (Example: Funds of your retired parents who may need it any time)
  • You have a lot of FDs on which you are paying significant taxes

When are Equity Funds suitable?

  • When you want to create a fund for a goal which is more than 5 years away
  • When you have surplus funds which you do not need to deploy in the next 5 years
  • When your preference is to generate inflation-beating returns and you think you have the ability to survive the volatility

In short, every investor should have some debt and equity components as part of the overall portfolio. For a lot of people, the debt exposure is taken care of through PF, PPF, FDs, NSCs and other such low return instruments. But for those who are investing for the first time and do not have a certain percentage of their wealth in the debt instruments, they can look to start investing in both debt and equity funds.

How does CAGRfunds help?

At CAGRfunds, we seek to make investing simple for you. So we do not clutter your mind with complicated technical financial terms. We just ask you your objectives of investments and suggest the suitable solutions to you. We believe in developing long-term relationships with our investors and hence our focus is solely on helping you meet your financial goals. For more information, feel free to contact us on +91 97693 56440 or drop us an email on contact@cagrfunds.com