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Is Bharat Bond ETF 2032 a good investment? Estimated returns are 6.87% if held for entire maturity period (11yrs) Who should and who should not invest in this?

Interest rates have bottomed out and are expected to go up in the future, probably from early next year. If that happens bond prices will fall. Long term bonds are affected the most when rates go up. If you sell before 11 years you may end up with low gains or even losses in the worst case. If you are reasonably sure that you will hold these till maturity it's a good and secure investment.

If I had to buy these bonds, I would wait for a few months and buy them from the secondary market.

Wouldn't instruments like RBI- Government of India- variable interest bonds be better- both in terms of interest and security? Probably the advantage of indexation may not be available in the RBI bonds.

Thank you. Now my understanding is that the mutual funds are with CDSL, instead of Zerodha. This means at some point if I were to move away from Zerodha, I need to find some other broker who provides a platform/ interface to sell my current mutual funds thereby preventing a vendor lock-in.
Is that correct?

Would mutual funds be an option for 4-5 months short term savings? Generally, I go down the FD route.

I have some lumpsum (<3.5L) and wondering what makes sense between now and June 22 that I’ll need to use it. Any pointers are welcome. Thanks.

You can park in overnight funds or liquid funds for this short period. Debt fund yields are pretty low though these days - around 3.5%

Correct, as per my understanding. I have not tested it but the MF units lie with demat account.

I have stopped parking liquid amounts in liquid funds, have shifted to IDFC savings bank.

The yields are better than a liquid MF (deposits in the range of 1L-10L yield 4.5% pa).
The interest is credited monthly. Since the account has a minimum balance requirement(25k in my case).

The account opening was completely online. Since I have not closed the account, not sure if it is possible to be done online or needs a visit to the issuing branch.

There is of course the risk that the bank may go down etc. That's the risk tradeoff we need to exercise as with any other investment.

Not necessarily true for all.

Note that SB interest is taxable @ your tax slab. So for sizeable balances assuming the 30% bracket, the effective rate of interest would be ~3.1%.

MF's have an edge from the tax perspective if the entire amount is not withdrawn within the same FY.

As an aside, the bank mentioned by you was offering 7% SB interest not too long ago. The significant reduction indicates that they want to reduce their interest burden and may not increase it in the future. On the other hand, returns in overnight / liquid funds will rise if there is any increase in interest rates in the future.

Dear Friends,

I hope all of you are doing well.
I lost my job in December of 2019. My company gave me a notice of 4 months and therefore I received the news in August itself. At that time, I immediately stopped my SIPs and started saving for my emergency corpus. By March 2020 the world was struck by Covid and any chances of getting a job further subdued. Thankfully, I was surrounded by a lovely family and friend group and got some freelance work by November 2020 which turned into a regular income that was able to meet my ends. To cut short, I got my job back in the same company with a promotion - I think because of well wishers all around.

I waited for 3-4 months to re-fill my emergency corpus and now want to start SIP again.

Currently I have only two targets 1) My son's education who is currently in class 9 and who wants to pursue an engineering degree.
2) To have decent funds for my retirement.

All other materialistic targets of life (bigger house, bigger car etc) I have postponed for the time being :coldsweat

I still have 14-15 years before retiring. Therefore, I have an appetite for taking risk. I am posting here to get some valuable advice from learned members of this group. Considering my targets, may I please request you to suggest some good funds for restarting my SIPs.

Thank you

Experts need your advise/suggestions.

I had a SIP in Mirae Asset Emerging Bluechip fund when I got a new year shock. The SIP debit didnt happen for the Jan month and when contacted the customer care team, I was told that my SIP had expired. There was no intimation of the SIP expiry from Mirae Asset. Now even if I want to start a fresh SIP, the max amount for SIP has been limited to Rs 2.5K. I felt frustrated with the MF house behaviour coz this was second time where they did this to me.

Have to move on I guess with some other MF. The SIP was a part of the retirement goal, hence need suggestions to invest. Should I stick to LC or L&MC category funds?

My Kotak flexicap fund SIP is due in March. Was thinking of stopping SIP's and start in Parag Parikh Flexicap. Would this be good move? Again this investment is for the retirement goal.

This has been the case for quite sometime with Mirae Emerging Bluechip. They have drastically limited investments into this fund. While this has been the best performer in my portfolio and SBI Small cap in the second place, both these funds have limits on how much you can invest and hence these have the smallest allocation % in my basket of funds. Unfortunate but thats the norm when the investment inflow into these funds is larger than manageable. Quite disappointing for me as well.

Actually you wouldn't have been able to extend the SIP even if you got the intimation of SIP expiry beforehand. The investment limit on MA Emerging Bluechip is a real bummer, but I kind of agree with their logic for doing so.
It is for this reason of limiting fresh investment by fund houses, that I have all my SIPs in popular funds as perpetual SIPs, even if I am not sure of continuing my investments in the future. It gives me the flexibility of choosing the ones I want to continue with (although I would still not be able to increase allocation if fresh investments are barred).

If you would like to stick to the same fund house, then Mirae Asset Tax Saver Fund would be a reasonable alternative (albeit a bit more conservative than Emerging Bluechip) managed by the same fund manager (these are the only two funds Neelesh Surana manages currently). I have had reasonably good experience with this fund for the last 3 years.

My experience with Kotak Flexicap has also been lukewarm, although they were the largest fund in flexicap category at one point. On the other hand, my experience with PPFAS Flexicap has been stellar for the last 7+ years. Hence I would whole-heartedly recommend this switch.

I think SBI Smallcap has increased the SIP limits to 25K per month for past few months now.

Hey Vikas
Basis my portfolio I've found the PGIM India Flexicap to be better than/at par with Parag Parikh Flexicap since the Exit load is much lesser. Returns are excellent.
IIFL Focussed equity fund had also been one of my top performers.

As per my experience with investing in MFs, fund houses increase the limit on SIPs when they want to restrict the inflow as they might not have enough options to invest for a good return. So this means they are cautious about the market.

I too have Parag Parikh Flixi cap fund in my PP. I chose this for a specific reason as they have bit of exposure to US market, which gives bit more diversification to my portfolio. SO comparing it with Kotak Flexicap might not be ideal as this invests 100% in Indian equity.

This is just my 2 bits on what little i know, not any sort of recommendation.