“Subra Sir, I am 24 years of age, why should I invest NOW? THERE is so much time to invest later on…”

Fair question. After all how many of us were saving and investing when we were 24? Not many I guess. Why preach what we did not do?

Simply because even we wish we knew!

Now that you know why you should SAVE, let us see why we should INVEST. The reasons to invest are of course the same as the reasons to save! You need to have money for Retirement, towards your other goals like buying a house, other assets like a car, pay for a vacation, pay for children’s education and marriage expenses, etc.

However, the most important reason for saving is to create a corpus. How to use the corpus is completely up to your choice, but creating the corpus is not much of a choice! Savings are nice if it is for small near term goals like making the down payment for a car or a house. However, if it is for a bigger goal or a goal that is say about 5 years away or 30 years away, that money HAS TO BE INVESTED.

Investments – assumes that the money is kept in volatile asset classes like equities, real estate, etc.

This obviously gives more volatile returns – and the assumption is that the returns will be greater than the inflation (called Real Returns) over a long period of time….