If experience is the best teacher, learning from other's experience is the next best. This week, we bring you an interview with Mr Arindam Ghosh , Chief Executive Officer of Mirae Asset Global Investments. With an experience of more than 12 years in investing and creating wealth, his insights on personal finance have many important lessons for investors. Edited excerpts:

What are your top financial goals?

Being in the business of managing money for others, one tends to find little time to manage one's own finances. Having said that, I have been able to craft a financial plan for myself based on some clear milestones for the future. My goals centre around ensuring a shelter for me and my family, providing for my son's education and building a retirement corpus.

Tell us about your most successful investment.

My most successful investment has been starting a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) in a diversified equity fund with the goal of ensuring a good education for my son. It is a simple and disciplined way of investing, through the ups and downs of the stock market. I never tried to time the market.

One mistake of investing or saving that you regret.

My biggest regret is not being able to start an SIP during my early earning days due to absence and lack of awareness of such a product at that time. However, I am happy that systematic investing has caught on at an impressive pace in the last few years, allowing millions of us Indians to benefit from this simple but amazing means of generating wealth.

What has been your most important learning experience so far?

It is extremely important for one to realise the need to plan your financial goals early on in life. While we may be able to save enough for a rainy day, to generate wealth in its true sense, requires us to take into account factors like return, inflation and risk too. Hence, the compelling need to diversify through products, asset classes and geographies, so that one is able to weather every storm and benefit from any opportunities that life brings. .

Tell us about books or investment guru that inspired you to think out of the box?

I am deeply inspired by Warren Buffet who has followed the principle of long-term investing to its core, while maintaining a simple lifestyle adorned with a high quality thought process.

What's the amount of wealth you hope to retire with?

While it is difficult to quantify the quantum of wealth, I would be content with a retirement nest that will allow me to lead a simple post retirement life, allowing me the flexibility to continue to pursue my favourite hobbies and pass time.

How do you plan your investments to beat inflation?

My investments are primarily in mutual funds, which I believe are one of the most convenient, affordable and transparent means of investing. My asset allocation is biased towards equity as I feel that it is the only asset class, which can beat inflation consistently over the long term not to forget the benefit of having experts manage your corpus at a marginal cost

What's your message on savings and investing to young people just starting out on their career?

I would advise youngsters to start investing from an early age and plan their various life stage goals of education, marriage, buying a car, owning a house etc. They would be able to maximise wealth by investing through the SIP mode and making the magic of compounding work in their favour. I would also advise them to think of making long-term investments and not get unduly perturbed by short-term market movements and situations. India is a multi decade growth story and hence people who have the foresight to invest regularly and commitment to stay invested for a long period of time would most likely end up maximising their wealth.

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