A financial planner can help channel investments

My husband and I save about ₹1.5 lakh per month after our equated monthly instalments on an education loan. I invest ₹5,000 a month in a mutual fund and my husband has a term life insurance of ₹2 crore. We have also bought property in a tier-II city. How and where should we invest our savings of ₹1.5 lakh effectively and efficiently?

—Surbhi Garg

To start with, you would do well to sit with a financial planner and work out the life events in future, which can guide you to plan your investments. But you do not need to wait for such an exercise to get going with your investments. At present, you are investing a very small portion of your savings in mutual funds; you can definitely increase it to, say, a third of your savings (to ₹50,000), demarcating it for your long-term (>10 years) goals. You can start with a 4-5 fund portfolio spread across market segments, and between domestic and international markets. You can choose good funds for this purpose from the Mint 50 list and invest confidently.

Srikanth Meenakshi is founder of Prime Investor.