[thirugata]

Some people say I am not expert and give answer based on their experience and with good intention.
Some say "go to an expert" and don't stop there but go on to elaborate why they said so again with good intention.

At the end of the day even go to an expert is an advise given by a "non expert", probably because it worked for him.

So, I fail to understand how different the 2 advises are.

[JediKnight]

Originally Posted by Vijay T

So far they have given me good returns of@21%CAGR on only mutual fund though the assurance was far lower. Time horizon is 5 to 6 years.

The market gave you @21% CAGR not your advisor. I am not saying that advice given by your advisor was of no consequence or he is bad. It is always good to listen to good/professional advise. But the principal reason you made money is there has been a massive bull run recently. Many DIY investors are sitting on bigger returns than this. If your advisor can get you +21% CAGR where as the market is doing -10% then we are onto something.

Originally Posted by SmartCat

While the advice to go to a financial services firm is sound, it is not a "catch all" solution for everybody. Only those who are not interested in the process & not keen on learning should opt for a financial advisor. If you want an analogy, we don't go about saying "just hire a driver" to anybody who has a car related question on teambhp.

After all, financial/retirement planning is just common sense. With some experience and effort, most people who are interested in the subject can do it themselves. Additionally, if a member gives an advice to OP with a caveat that "I'm not an expert", we should not be mocking him here.

If the mutual fund thread on teambhp has 320 pages of content, 4800 posts and 1.5 million views, we have to assume that DIY route is popular.

+100. Listen to every one but finally it is your judgement. I have had multiple advisors. Most good. Some bad. Some even giving advise to do illegal stuff. (Just look up how Rahul Dravid ended up in panama papers)

Finally it is your money. And using the driver analogy given by smartcat, even if you hire a driver keep a tab on what he is doing. And if he is good one learn from him and become a better driver your self.

[srsrini]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

Amazing.

For readers of this thread, do expand a bit more on how one should find & select a retirement planner, pitfalls if any and what to watch out for.

Thanks for the comment. It means a lot coming from you. I would start with the view (at least mine) that any financial planning should start with retirement planning - everything else comes after that. In a lighter vein, one can take a loan for almost anything now, but not for retirement! In India, and in most countries, you get two kinds of advisors/planners. For one kind - much smaller in India - you pay the fees directly. For the second kind, the payment happens via commissions from the product. The first kind can work across products, but the second kind would typically be for one product.

But we are chatting on the Mutual Funds Thread, and mutual funds indeed can fill any and every financial need. So a good MF Distributor can be a good way to start. A simple check would be to see if they keep talking about returns, or they spend time to talk about your goals. The first kind of people are regulated by SEBI and are called Investment Advisors. The word Registered is often prefixed and so you have RIAs. (Ria would be the daughter of Moon Moon Sen). There are two models that are allowed for the fees - charge by the assets, and fixed fees. The AUM fee RIAs may have minimal networth criteria. Most fixed fee RIAs won't have such criteria, and may take the view that if the client is comfortable with the fees, they would take them on. Focus on returns vs focus on goals factor would apply to RIAs. The list in freefincal was mentioned in an earlier reply. That link also has further information on how to select a flat fee RIA, how you can work online with them, etc.

I don't want to violate the policy of not sharing too many links. But I hope that this link would be accepted. It is written by a young flat fee RIA: https://freefincal.com/list-question...ncial-planner/. There is a self selected group of flat fee RIAs who are committed to have a transparent fee structure. The group is called FeeOnlyIndia and a search would give the website.

[Hells Bells]

Originally Posted by androdev

Given the large corpus involved (6cr), I do not think a "flat fee" based service is the right option for at least two reasons I can think of:

1. The service provider has zero incentive to grow your wealth.
2. In this day and age, it's hard to find highly talented professionals working with such a payment model. To put it differently, a person with 6cr corpus might want to look at a different service offering.

For someone with a large corpus like 6cr - there will be more high end investment professionals who would be interested in offering their services.

A fee-only financial planner (not a wealth management professional) is a must-do exercise as they will help you establish what your future needs are more precisely, how much would that cost you to sustain the need without missing the indexation bit, and what you may (or may not) need to change in your current state to achieve your future needs. By being fee-only, they dont have a conflict of interest in terms of which MF AMCs or direct stocks they would propose to you.

However, a financial planner is never meant to monitor your portfolio performance expertly as they only look to check if you are still on track, not if you can do better.

I used a fee-only advisor to really take stock of my finances and create a wireframe of plan against my retirement plans. I sustained with the advisor for 2 years before I moved away.

Now I use wealth management professional to manage the portfolio and preferably, seek alpha. The original exercise of the financial planner now allows me to be very clued in about if I am in the right direction.

My view - always start with financial planning before you get into wealth management support.

P.S: I paid ~40K for first year to the financial planner in 2017 which included the grunt work of creating the financial plan and then sustaining it for first year. 2nd yr onwards, it was around 15K for just sustaining the plan and making adjustments if my situation (requirements, liabilities, wants etc) changed.

[Maverick Avi]

Received an email from SBI mentioning a change in fundamental attributes for their overnight fund giving investors the option to redeem or switch without exit load during a particular time frame. On reading the notice I didn't find much change in the new and proposed scheme. Can experts shed some light on this?

[sushantr5]

Reading all these discussions I got one question in my mind,

Do I need a Financial Advisor? (RIA)

I am only in mutual funds and my portfolio has performed really good, giving more than 20% XIRR for last 6 years. I am into market for long term. Then question is, what difference will Financial Advisor bring?

[DigitalOne]

Originally Posted by sushantr5

Reading all these discussions I got one question in my mind,

Do I need a Financial Advisor? (RIA)

As long as you have the below basics right, you don't need a financial advisor:

- Direct plans only and not Regular plan
- Core portfolio of large cap Index funds ~50%
- Midcap portfolio of around ~30% (either Index or Active funds)
- Small cap + Thematic + Sectoral combined portfolio <20%.
- Systematic investment and not trying to time the market
- Avoid chasing returns and frequent churning

[skumare]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

- Core portfolio of large cap Index funds ~50%
- Midcap portfolio of around ~30% (either Index or Active funds)
- Small cap + Thematic + Sectoral combined portfolio <20%.

To remove the conservative bias, I would suggest a gradual risk adjustment approach:
Till 40yr - 35%SC+35%MC+30%LC
40-50yr - 30%SC+30%MC+40%LC
50-60yr - 25%SC+25%MC+50%LC
60yr+ 50% of the equity MF corpus to be moved to Balanced or Hybrid funds
(do diversify your assets with approporiate debt/gold/real estate components)

[Rodie09]

Hi guys,

I am trying to set up a mandate in Zerodha coin app for SIP investments into mutual funds.

While setting it up I noticed that the mandate is by default set up at INR 1 Cr (must be upper limit). Should I be worried? Or can I proceed safely? My plan is to invest about 20-25 k per month through this.

TIA

[saket77]

Originally Posted by Rodie09

Hi guys,

I am trying to set up a mandate in Zerodha coin app for SIP investments into mutual funds.

While setting it up I noticed that the mandate is by default set up at INR 1 Cr (must be upper limit). Should I be worried? Or can I proceed safely? My plan is to invest about 20-25 k per month through this.

TIA

I haven't set up a mandate at Zerodha but there should be an option to manually put the mandate amount. Also, just to note, this mandate amount is generally set for each day (& not month). So, a mandate of Rs. 50K should be good enough for most people.

Thanks.

[sagarpadaki]

Originally Posted by Rodie09

Hi guys,

I am trying to set up a mandate in Zerodha coin app for SIP investments into mutual funds.

While setting it up I noticed that the mandate is by default set up at INR 1 Cr (must be upper limit). Should I be worried? Or can I proceed safely? My plan is to invest about 20-25 k per month through this.

TIA

Mandate limit is per year. So, unless you are planning to invest more than 1Cr using Zerodha per year, you should be good.


EDIT- My bad. NomadSK has posted the right info below

[NomadSK]

Originally Posted by Rodie09

While setting it up I noticed that the mandate is by default set up at INR 1 Cr (must be upper limit). Should I be worried? Or can I proceed safely?

You shouldn't be worried. I do few SIP's through coin app. The mandate limit is for 1cr per day.

[Rodie09]

Thanks guys! I understand that there is not much to worry. However, they should have allowed users to set their limits. 1 Cr per day sounds insane - am not used to such figures

[maddy42]

When the query of Financial planner and Mutual fund distributor is on could someone provide which strategy fits whom in their life cycle of investment?

Which is recommended for a beginner investor - Direct vs Regular mutual funds?

I have seen tweets where Än example of a person investing in a regular mutual fund for x years and yielded like 40 lacs, but if he did it in direct plan he would have made 43 lac".

But most of the replies kind of echoes my thought that if he didnt have a distributor, the persons pshycology may have prevented him from continuing his investments for a longer time frame as "sitting idle" is the hardest thing to do when you get to see your portfolio every day, and there is so much data available on funds which are beating you on a daily basis.

Any thoughts around it?

[skumare]

Originally Posted by maddy42

When the query of Financial planner and Mutual fund distributor is on could someone provide which strategy fits whom in their life cycle of investment?

Which is recommended for a beginner investor - Direct vs Regular mutual funds?

Irrespective of age, amount involved, I would suggest engage a Fee-Only-Advisor (if required) and invest in Direct funds.
You can subscribe to MF reports (ex: Value Research) and review their performance on monthly/quarterly basis, need not look at them every day/hour. One can follow NIFTY indices to keep self updated on the market trends.