Planning for your child’s education
A degree that’s a decade away has a price you can estimate now and a date you roughly know — the two things a plan needs most.
What you’re really planning for
What you’re planning for is a bill that arrives on a fairly fixed date, whatever else is happening that year. Education costs have tended to rise faster than a general basket of prices, so the number worth planning for is usually higher than today’s fee.
The good news is that a goal like this is not vague once you write it down: it’s an amount, a date, and a monthly figure — and the arithmetic between them is ordinary.
The three numbers
Start by pricing it in today’s money as specifically as you can, then age that cost forward to the year you’ll need it, because prices rise — the amount you actually need is the future cost, not today’s.
Price the course at today’s fees, decide the year it starts, and age the cost forward — that inflated figure is the real target. The Child education planner does that arithmetic and shows the monthly SIP that could fund it.
Setting a goal, step by step walks through turning a wish into those three numbers, and the Child education planner lets you put your own figures in. Every figure a calculator shows is an illustration from the numbers you enter, not a projection of returns.
How the money is put to work
For a goal that’s years away, most people invest a fixed amount every month through an SIP, so the buying is spread across many dates instead of riding on one.
How long you have until you need the money is what decides how much rise-and-fall you can sit through: a long horizon can absorb the swings of equity because you aren’t forced to sell at a moment you didn’t choose, while money needed soon has to sit somewhere steadier. Equity, debt and hybrid explains what each of those holds.
New to any of this? What a mutual fund is starts from the top, and SIP or lump sum covers the two ways of putting money in.
How we help — and what we don’t do
We’re an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-200996). We help you complete your KYC, open a folio and place your instructions, and we’ll walk you through anything you’re unsure about — we’re available Monday to Sunday, 8:00 AM – 10:00 PM IST.
What we don’t do is tell you which scheme to buy. There’s no single right answer we could print for everyone, and choosing depends on your goal, your horizon and how much variation in value you can live with. We’ll go through those factors with you and help you act once you’ve decided. How we’re paid sets out that we’re paid a trail commission by the fund house, and what that costs you.
Direct plans of the same schemes cost less because they carry no distributor commission; if you’d rather manage it all yourself, we’d rather say so than have you find out later.
Put your own numbers in with the Child education planner, or talk it through with us first — whichever you prefer.