inflation – Ascent Financial Solutions

How to fight with inflation?

Prakash Lohana — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 16:44:42 +0000

As discussed in my earlier post “Inflation: Biggest Enemy in your Financial Life.” Inflation is one of the most signifacant risk to once fiancial life, now the question is how to fight with it?

First of all investors need to recognize the impact of inflation on their long term goals. Most of the times while planning for their financial goals investors either don’t consider inflation or try to consider it in ad hoc manner which is wrong. When you consider 8% inflation it is compounded 8% p.a. and not simple so your cost will double almost in every 9 years. It has a very slow but significant impact on our Financial Goals. Below chart will show you the value of goal increases at 8% inflation over the years.

Now let us discuss some important aspects of investing to fight with the inflation.

Start Early: Most importantly to fight with the inflation, you have to start saving for goals as early as possible. More you delay, more it will be difficult for you to achieve that goal. Let us take an example of education goal discussed in my last post.

From above chart it is clearly evident that goal value reaches to 74 lacs from 20 lacs in a period of 17 years. Now let us see how much investment is required at 10% returns on investment to achieve the goal of Rs. 74 lacs if we start investing from now, delay the investment for 5 years (Start the investment for the goal when child is 6 years old) or delay the investment for 10 years (start the investment when the child is 11 years old).

In above table in option A the investor selects to save for the goals from now. So he needs to invest Rs. 1.83 lacs every year for next 17 years and total investment required is Rs.31.02 lacs. Whereas if he starts after 5 years( as shown in Option B) he will have to save for 12 year only but annual investment required to achieve value of Rs. 74 lacs will be 3.46 lacs and total investment required is 41.52 lacs . So delay of 5 years increases the total investment required by around 10.50 lacs (41.52-31.02) which around 33% more than Option A when investment for the goal is started immediately. In C investment starts 10 years late as compared to A and so the annual investment required is 7.80 lacs and total investment required to achieve the goal is 54.60 lacs which is 23 lacs (76%) higher as compared to option A . So the earlier you start better you will be to beat inflation.

Try to Earn High Real Returns : Indian investors are traditionally fond of investing in fixed deposits and gold. Typically returns in these asset classes range between 7% to 9% p.a. and inflation in different goals is also somewhat similar to returns so they end up earning very low real returns.

If you are investing Rs. 100 in 8% fixed deposit and inflation is also 8% then after one year you will get Rs. 108 from your fixed deposit and due to inflation goods or services which you are able to buy today with Rs.100 will also be available for Rs. 108 so actually you have just maintained value of money and not earned any returns.

Let us once again take example of education goal discussed above. To achieve education goal of Rs. 74 lacs after 17 years if investment is started right now, Let us see how much investment is required if rate of return on investment made is 8%, 10% and 12%.

As shown in above chart, at 12% Rate of Return annual investment required is 1.51 lacs and total investment required is 25.73 lacs where as at 10% Rate of Return annual investment required is Rs.1.82 and total investment required to achieve goal is 31.02 lacs. So at 10% Rate of Return on investment , total investment required increases by 5.29 lacs which is 21% higher as compared to investment done at 12% Rate of Return. Similarly in case of investment done at 8% returns annual investment required is Rs. 2.19 lacs and total investment required to achieve the goal is 37.27 lacs. So at 8% Rate of Return one has to invest Rs. 11.53 lacs more to achieve education goal as compared to investment to be done at 12% Rate of Return.

Now, you may have a question that how to achieve 10% or 12% Rate of Returns. So for your long term goals inflation is the most significant risk and to beat it you should be investing a part of your investment in asset classes like equity which can give you higher returns and then rebalance your portfolio between equity and debt. IF you have investment horizon of more than 5 years then a significant part of your total investment should be invested in Equity oriented Mutual Fund. Please do remember that for deciding how much should be invested in equity? and how it should be rebalanced? You should take the help of a qualified financial planner.

Equity as an asset class contains risk of volatility but it helps you to beat inflation and for your long term goals you should take risk of volatility and not inflation. For Financial goals which are short term you should not take risk of volatility. Most of the time investors don’t consider inflation as a risk, which is a big mistake that they do.

To conclude with, to fight with inflation you have to earn high real returns and start investing as early as possible.

Inflation: Biggest Enemy in your Financial Life.

Prakash Lohana — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 09:28:12 +0000

Inflation is one of the biggest enemies in our financial life but most of the times I find that investors forget to consider impact of inflation on their financial lives. In this article I will try to explain “what is inflation?” from micro economic perspective and then we will see what is impact of inflation on our life?

What is Inflation?

As a general definition “Inflation is a continuous rise in the prices of commodities, goods and services.” This means that when prices of any goods, commodities or services keep increasing on a continuous basis that is inflation. But actually it is other way round, prices of commodities does not increase but value of currency keeps falling and that’s why its purchasing power also falls so what a 100 rupee currency note could buy a year ago, it cannot buy the same goods and services today. So there is fall in the value of rupee or purchasing power of rupee has fallen. There are many reasons for this but one primary reason for this is when the government prints new currency and puts in the economy by spending it on infrastructure, rising salaries etc. the value of existing currency falls. This happens because same commodities are chased by more currency. So Inflation is basically fall in the purchasing power of Rupee and not the rise in the price of the commodities.

How it affects your financial life?

The biggest mistake layman investors make is, they forget to consider impact of inflation on their financial life. Inflation has a severe impact on our long term goals like Retirement, Education Cost of our children etc. Let me explain you with few real life case studies to bring more clarity.

Recently, a client approached me for his financial planning. He had just retired from senior management of a very good company.

Following are his facts and figures.

This gentleman had saved in PPF and EPF for entire life except for some small life insurance policies. When I met him He was of the view that he has around 80 lacs corpus which is sufficient to survive. He told me that he will receive around 8% interest in fixed deposit which will come to

Rs. 640000 ( 8% * 8000000). His monthly expenses including all type of expenses are Rs. 40000 so annually he needs Rs. 480000/- and his interest income will be Rs. 640000 so he will save around Rs. 160000(640000-480000). In this case if I assume 8% p.a. inflation in his cost of living let us see How his annual cost of living increases over next 10 years.

For convenience we have assumed zero taxes and 8% interest rates. PPF corpus of Rs. 10 lacs is kept for meeting any medical emergencies and hence not taken into account in calculations.

Look in above table, in fifth year (2019) his cost of living is more than his interest income. Please note that he is not increasing his lifestyle, he is just maintaining his life style and from 2019 onwards if he wants to maintain same lifestyle, he will have to withdraw from his basic capital Rs. 80 lacs.

Mistake this gentleman made is he did not consider impact of inflation on his cost of living. Similarly let us see some other life goals how they are affected by inflation.

How inflation affects your Children’s education goals?

Last month a couple came to me to plan higher education cost of their one year old son. He estimated that his son will need Rs.20 lacs to go abroad to get higher education in a good engineering college when he reaches age of 17 years so wanted to invest from now. He wanted to invest Rs. 5 lacs now and believed that it will become Rs. 20 lacs when his son reaches 18 years. But this Rs. 20 lacs was today’s value of that education cost. When I asked about inflation on that cost he was blank and had no answer. Following table will show the inflation adjusted value of Rs. 20 lacs after 17 years.

The value of Rs. 20 lacs becomes Rs. 74 lacs after 17 years. So goal which was looking easy to achieve now looks very difficult.

When I made above calculation and showed him that inflation adjusted value of Rs. 20 Lacs will be around 74 lacs they were first shocked and argued that there is some mistake in calculation. Afterwards they accepted this calculation.

So inflation is our biggest enemy in completing our long term goals. But major issue is that while planning our future goals like Retirement, Education fund for our children etc. we don’t take into consideration inflation. Either we consider same level of expenses in long term or we don’t calculate their future values putting inflation percentage properly. This way inflation is the biggest risk to our long term goals but it has very low affect on our short term goals. Suppose a goal is only one year away from now then the inflation will not affect if much but for long term goals inflation is the biggest risk.

In my next article I will be writing on “How to fight with inflation?” and that will be in continuation to this article based on case studies discussed above.