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How to start Your Investment Journey?

Let's start from the very beginning...a very good place to start, as the song goes.

How do you start when you plan a normal journey?

 

If you go into Google Maps or whichever is your favorite app, you put in the destination, of course, where you want to go, say an address in Sarojini Nagar or Lokhandwala or Koramangala.  But that alone will not be enough for the app to start giving you the directions.

There is another very important data-point you have to put in, which is the starting point.

For your investment journey, it is  pretty much the same!

Some of you might already have investment goals.

But my question to you is that do you know your starting point?

As step one, I would say... get to know your starting point.

So, what does that mean?

First of all...Look at all your investments. Where your money is and look at how it is split.

This may seem like a trivial thing to do or you may even think you 'broadly' know your investments but don't be too sure of  this unless you have actually done the numbers. Look  alone small investors, I've seen large family offices thinking, for example, that they are mainly in global fixed income and after collating all data finding that they have the most weightage in real estate which had accumulated over the years.

 Here are the broad categories or asset classes into which you should classify your investments:

  • Fixed Income which means Fixed Deposits, Fixed Income mutual funds, and so on.
  • Equity, which includes direct Equity, as well as Equity Mutual Funds or PMS schemes.
  • Real Estate or Property.
  • Gold and other previous metals
  • Crypto and other alternative assets.

If you're an active investor, you may have derivatives, commodities etc too.

This is your asset pie.

So first look at how your pie looks, and of course, on the other side, you have

Loans, whether it is housing loan, car loan, student loan or any other.

Therefore, the first step is to know all of that. Once you know that, only then you can decide

how you want to split things.

Are you where you want to be?

Or is there some distance to go?

But you have to know your starting point.

Within Equities you have to know Geographically and sector wise how the split works. And then you can decide your goal, and the path to that goal.

So do that as an exercise. Take a piece of paper or a

Spreadsheet, and do this right away.

This is literally the first step and as the saying goes, 'The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.'

As for the next step, more on that next week

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