What comes in your mind when we talk about MUTUAL FUNDS. I hope you have read my previous article about what is Mutual Fund Want to save for a rainy day and don’t know where to keep the extra money? Though investment avenues are multifarious, but more versatile are the reasons for which a person plans to save. Some want to just keep aside a portion of money and use it in the future when a big corpus is created (which is nothing more than sum total of amount saved every year), while others want their money to return to them after increasing.

Age old habit of keeping money in savings account in banks has somewhat lost many of its takers; reasons are many to quote. Interest rates have slashed down in recent times, one of the most popular reasons to begin with. In addition to these, newer investment options have popped up in recent times and performed beyond expectations. So, investing in mutual fund has proved to be an enticing option for those investors who are profit-oriented in thinking, and who doesn’t want extra money.

If you observe closely, people have been saving since times immemorial. Mutual funds companies have just given a systematic garb to the people’s savings habits. When mutual funds were not around, a group of people used to pool together a specific amount from each member, and by the way of lottery they used to declare the beneficiary of the collected money for the month. (This system is still functional at informal level!)

Now let’s take a look at the mutual funds that are somewhat analogous to this practice of pooling money. Companies dealing in mutual funds not only collect money from the investors, but also look for premises such as stocks of the companies, debt instruments, and other assets that are considered profit-yielding options. Money invested by the individual investors and pooled together by the fund managers is used for – infrastructural developments, to carry out an ambitious infrastructural project of a company or for bringing some technological innovation – that is of great use to the inhabitants of the country. All these reasons give way to the possibility of earning returns from the money that investors give to their fund managers, from savings point of view.

Investment made in mutual funds grows due to power of compounding and averaging of return-cost ratio. By giving your money to the fund manager to invest, you are handing him over the responsibility of managing your corpus. Thus, he re-invests returns made by your money at a constant rate every year and other returns generated in the form of interest, dividends etc. also keep appending. That is why, there is an appreciable increase registered in the amount you invested at the end of the investment period. This is the main principle behind the working of a mutual fund.

Past performance figures reveal that investors putting their trust in mutual fund investments were able to earn 15-20% returns, on an average. At times, it has grown to as high as 30-40% too. Since there is an intelligent mix of market-oriented and debt-based options in a typical mutual fund, the risk also is comparatively less, as compared to pure equity-based instruments like, stocks.

Thus, by savings in mutual funds, an investor meets a variety of purposes:

1. He is able to earn extra from his own savings
2. He is indirectly contributing to the economic development of the country
3. He is creating extra income for himself to meet the unforeseen expenses
4. And last but not the least, he is securing his future too.

Costs involved in investing in mutual funds comprise of transaction costs, asset management cost, holding fees and other implied taxes. Thus, the amount that is actually invested is your money minus all the taxes. Mutual funds perform in spite of all these costs, such is the power of compounding. To make more out of your money, it is advisable to keep the money for the long term. So, if you are looking for the investment option that is yielding like a stock but safer than it, then mutual funds prove to be the smartest choice.

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