If our savings are meant for very long term goals like Child insurance

Set savings goals and invest with discipline for that goal: Attaching a goal to a savings and investment plan will always motivate you to stick to the plan. The goal can be short-term like: travelling or buying a car. Alternatively, the goal can be long-term like: retirement. For each goal, figure out how long you have to save for it and set your monthly savings target towards that amount. There is a facility in mutual funds called SIP (Systematic Investment Planning) which sets up automatic transfers from your savings account to the designated investment. As is rightly said – if you don’t see it, you won’t spend it!

Investments should beat inflation: If our savings are meant for very long term goals like Child Insurancehttp://www.bajajallianz.com/Corp/life-insurance/child-gain.jsp, children’s weddings, retirement, etc., then it would make more sense to ensure that the returns from our investments should beat inflation. If they fail to do so, then the whole purpose is defeated. We may consider bank FDs safe but if they don’t help reach the target amount, then what is the purpose of having it in the first place? This is where equity investments like direct equity, equity MFs or equity ULIPs can give better inflation-adjusted returns in the long term, than the popular fixed income instruments.

Conclusion: Finally, I would like to conclude by a quote from by Ron Lewis: “It’s never too early to encourage long term savings.” I would advice every investor to start saving and investing at least 10% of their monthly income towards their goal. The earlier you start saving, the more time your money has to benefit from ‘the power of compounding.’