Its been more than 10 years since I have been investing into stock market, mutual funds and insurances. I have learned a lot lesson from my good and bad decisions. I think its worth sharing to everyone.

1. SIPs does wonder in long run. I have started my first SIP in year October 2013 in a Fund namely ICICI Prudential Value Discovery Fund – Regular Plan – Growth. I started with merely 2K monthly and It has become around 3 Lakhs.
2. Mutual Fund Distributors do not suggest index fund despite it has beaten more than 90% of active funds in long run in past because Index Funds comes with way lesser expense ratio than active funds so the Distributor’s commission becomes even lesser. One should Invest in index funds even if you don’t know about market because India is going to grow no matter what. I will not show any comparison but I have given an index fund performance 

   UTI Nifty Index Fund – Direct Plan

   Note : I personally like Nifty 50 over Sensex that’s why I have taken Nifty for showing return
3. Emergency Fund should be an first step towards you investment journey. Everyone of us like to earn more and lead a healthy and prosperous life. If I will ever have a super power, then I will make this a fundamental right for everyone until then one should start investing for a better future. But There is a very interesting fact that most of the people have no idea how much is their monthly expense?  Its very common question people ask before investing is that “Will I be able to withdraw my money if I am in a need of it?” 
4. Life Insurance is must to have. You should purchase at least one life insurance specially term plan with only natural and accidental death cover of 20X of you current yearly income. I am not suggesting to take any rider because it inflate the insurance cost unimaginably high.
5. LIC Policies are not investment plans. You must be wondering , Why I am saying so. I got my first LIC policy namely Jeevan Saral (Plan-165) on 12 Sep 2009 and It got matured in 2019 and  I have paid premium of 2450 Quarterly (~800 Rs per month). I have paid about 96K as investment but guess how much I got ?  It was 1.21 Lakh only but if the same amount would have been invested in a value fund then I would have got more than 1.45 Lakh easily.
6. Purchasing a house is not an investment unless you have black money or you are owning it to live in it. Real Estate is not a good investment until you are getting rent or annuity of ~7%. Still Real Estate has very soft corner in the people’s heart. Specially in villages, I have been asked this question many times: “तोहार केतना खेत बाटे?” . They understand it as symbol of prosperity which is actually not.

7. There is something very much interesting about ULIP. Some of its promoters says, ULIP is “इनवेस्टमेंट भी इंसुरेंस भी” and My reaction to it is “कुछ भी 👊”. I am again these ULIP plans because they neither create good wealth nor give better risk cover. So it actually becomes like “Dhobi ka Kutta”.  I always prefer to keep insurance and investment portfolio completely separate. 

8. You are going to get low interest if you are paying low interest on your home loans. We all hate low return on our safe investments like term deposits like bank’s FD, Post Office’s Saving Certificate but we love the low interest rates on the home loans. Its practically impossible to get good rate of return on our safe investment and home loans on lower return.
9. Watching TV Channels on stocks market are not gonna help you in getting rich. I used to see people wearing suit boot and giving financial advise on how to make money from stock market. I always wonder if this fellow knows this much about stock market then why is the on TV. He should be making money and chilling out somewhere else.
10. Trading will never make your rich instead it will surely makes your broker rich. Every time you trade you take additional leverage and trade values more than 10 to 20 times more money than you actually have in your trading account and at the end of the session