Have been reading on Ramit Sethi's blog where he stresses on setting your Savings/Investments in a Auto Pilot mode and i started wondering how can we in India do that ..
1) Increase PF Contribution : For those of you who are employed and for whom your employer provides you with a Provident Fund , first figure out if you can increase the contibution from the current 12% to say any percentage more ( Maximum would be 25% ) . your employer will not match you , but just that you have started to contribute more money that would be compounding at 8.5% interest .
2) Mutual Fund SIP: Start a SIP of any 5 start rated Mutual fund( http://www.valueresearchonline.com/toprated.asp) , choose first of the month as date of SIP
3) Open a Recurring Deposit: You can open a recurring deposit , try to keep desposit date in the first week of the month . Now you even have a Recurring deposit , whose interest is variable .
4) Use a Online trading account: Some of the trading accounts ( Sharekhan.com does) allows you to set a SIP for stock(s) .That is to buy a certain script on a specific day of the month .May be for a start, try to buy NIFTY BEES (benchmarkfunds.com/static/Nifty/overview.cgi)
The Intent in all these is not only to automate , but also to make you "Pay Yourself First".
If you can think of any other ways of doing this , Please do comment .
