How you can fight back
- Review your emergency fund requirement. Keep six months' expenses as emergency funds, mostly in short-term debt funds such as inflation- and tax-efficient FMPs.
- Examine your health and life cover. With costs going up, you need to bump up your life and health covers. Go for low-cost, high-cover term plans and floating health covers to bridge the gap. avoid large idle savings and bank balances. Invest in short-term debt funds like FMPs.
- Defer large loan-based purchases. Avoid large EMIs that will stretch your finances more. Go for your first home if you can afford the down payment and EMI.
- Prepay high-cost loans. Start with your floating rate home loan. Remember, no investment option will provide guaranteed returns that equal the higher interest payout.
- Seek capital gains and dividend instead of interest. Interest income gets taxed at your income tax rate. Long-term capital gains and dividends from equity and equity MFs are tax-free, but taxed at 10 per cent without indexation and 20 per cent with indexation if coming from debt funds. Dividends from debt funds are tax-free post dividend distribution tax.
- Continue staggered investments in equity and equity MFs. Carry on with your systematic investment plans (SIPs) in equity funds. For fresh investments, seek large-cap funds from OLM 50 that are likely to benefit from a rebound along with blue chips they predominantly invest in.
- Diversify into international funds and gold. Gain from the upsides in well-performing equity markets in other countries by investing in international funds. Investing in gold (up to 5-10 per cent of your corpus) will give your portfolio a stable growth.
- Avoid interest rate-sensitive stocks. This includes sectors such as real estate and auto. The best bets would be large-cap pharma and FMCG stocks currently available at attractive valuations.
