Where can I invest monthly surpluses to reach my goals

As a less risk taker you should invest in PPF or fixed income products. PPF will be suitable if you also want to save taxes also.

However, as you have 3 long term goals - individual house, children education and marriage, these cannot be achieved easily by investing in PPF or other traditional fixed income schemes. Therefore, you should invest in mutual funds. However, to invest in mutual funds your risk taking ability has to be slightly higher. For example - if you can take moderate risk, then you can expect around 12% annual returns over 10-15 years by investing in balanced funds. As you can see the return differential between PPF/traditional investments versus balanced funds is as high as around 4%.

How much return can you get by investing Rs 10,000 per month through SIPs in next 10 - 15 years? You can expect a corpus of Rs 23 Lakhs in 10 years against investment of Rs 12 Lakhs or Rs 50 Lakhs after 15 years against investment of Rs 18 Lakhs. These are based in assumption of annual return of 12%.

As you can see, just by investing Rs 10,000 a month over 10-15 years you can create a significant corpus to meet your respective goals either fully or partly. We suggest that you should plan separate target corpuses for each of these financial goals and chase them by investing in balanced mutual fund SIPs.

Happy investing and thanks for writing to Advisorkhoj!