Schemes for Children’s Future
Parents need to save and invest regularly from early days to comfortably meet the expenses of higher education and marriage of their children.
The most important and most beneficial investment product for this purpose is mutual Funds. Investment through SIPs and lumpsum right from the early stages of the children will lead to accumulation of huge corpus when they take up higher education. While sufficient amt. can be withdrawn periodically for the education expenses from the Mutual Fund corpus, the regular SIP investments can be continued so that another big corpus will be getting ready. This can be useful to meet marriage expenses of the children if their own savings is not sufficient.
Any further surplus of the corpus can be used as a part of the parents’ retirement fund.
Investment in stocks (shares) can also be made selectively for the benefit of the children.
These are very tax-efficient investments.
This is also a Govt. scheme where a parent can invest upto a maximum of Rs. 1.50 lakh in each Financial Year in the names of one girl child or two girl children. The total limit permissible is Rs. 1.50 lakh only (for a single girl child or both girl children). Annual interest credited to the SSY a/c is tax-free.
At the time of opening the SSY a/c, the age of girl child should not exceed 10 years. The SSY a/c will mature for payment when the child completes 21 years of age.
NRIs are not eligible to invest in SSY.
The interest rate on SSY is slightly higher than that offered on PPF. Hence, those parents who have girl child/children can opt for this investment.
