Daybreak - Where to invest Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh, Rs 1 crore

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Investing extra money can be confusing, no matter how big or small the amount. What works for someone with Rs 1 crore is very different from what suits someone with Rs 1 lakh or Rs 10 lakh. Experts say everyone should first take care of basic needs before investing.There are many simple, logical, and even unconventional ways to invest. Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first studio recording, episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Hi there. So today I have something special for you. I'm going to read out one of the most popular exclusive subscriber-only stories on personal finance from this year written by my

colleague Anand Kalyana Raman. It is titled Where to Invest, 1,000, 10 lakh and 1 crore rupees. Here goes. A surplus lands in your bank account. Not life-changing money necessarily, but enough that spending it on a phone or a holiday feels faintly irresponsible. You could do that,

or you could invest it and let compounding do its magic. Delay the gratification. The problem is not intent, but choice. Should the money go into equity, debt, gold or property, into stocks or mutual funds, fixed deposits or bonds, gold funds or small savings schemes. Should the approach be active or passive, short term or long term? And hovering over all of it is a harder question. Do this investor's personal situation and today's market make any of these choices sensible right now?

Scale in practice is a differentiator here. A 1 lakh rupees surplus poses a different problem from a 10-lack-rupee surplus. And a one-crawru-rupy surplus changes the conversation altogether. Never mind novice investors, even seasoned investors struggle to reconcile these variables. So, the Ken spoke to four Sebi-registered investment advisors and a wealth manager who advises family offices, people whose job is to sit in front of these questions all day. Their solutions are logical and counterintuitive all at once with a dash of unconventional thrown in. We crystallize these insights to try and answer the million-rupy question.

How to invest 1,000, 10-lac and 1-crow rupees. So here are the unconventional shots. The first, real estate, but selectively. Most financial planners would not touch real estate as an investment with a barge pole. Not Deepesh Raghur, the founder of financial planning website, personal finance plan. Rago thinks rich investors with a high surplus, say one crore rupees, can consider commercial property that offers good fixed income like returns from rental yields and capital appreciation. He says plots can also be a good option for capital appreciation.

But hasn't real estate shot up like crazy? Also, isn't it cumbersome to manage? Rago thinks that while real estate in big cities has become quite expensive, that's not necessarily the case with many smaller cities and towns. But the desire for real estate exposure has to come from the investor, he said. It's not for everyone. He does not recommend investing in residential houses because yields are low, the asset is heterogeneous and returns may not match up unless the investor has specific insight into upside potential in a location. Some other advisors remain cautious but are more open to limited exposure via real estate investment

trusts or reeds which pool money into income-generating property assets without the operational hassle. The next is looking east-northwest. Going against the grain, Samad Doseja, the co-founder and CEO of Global Private Wealth Management Company, True Mind Capital, strongly recommends having a 7 to 10% exposure to China-oriented funds. While almost everyone recommends international investing in U.S. stocks, Doseja takes a different view. He said, valuations are still reasonable in China and there is big growth potential there, especially in technology companies with an AI play. The Hangsang Index is much cheaper than the US stock market.

Based on the past year's earnings, investors pay about 13 times profits to buy Hangseng stocks while they pay about 28 times profits for stocks in S&P 500. The Seja also favors exchange traded funds linked to the United Arab Emirates. The logic is currency risk. He says, Indians need a hedge against rupee weakness. The next advice is keep it simple. Unconventional? Yes.

Complex? No. For instance, the registered investment advisors that they can spoke with advised against portfolio management schemes or PMS schemes that need a minimum investment of 50 lakh rupees. PMSs are tax inefficient, high cost, have high churn to justify costs and have inappropriate benchmarking, they said. Ravi Saragi, the co-founder of financial planning firm, some Stiti advisors, said PMS and AIFs or alternative investment funds are guilty unless proven otherwise.

Most financial planners also frown upon crypto as an investment. Shashi Singh, the founder of financial planning firm FinMind, says that its valuation dynamics cannot be fathomed. Besides the recently launched specialized investment funds or SIFs, which require a minimum investment of 10 lakh rupees and offer higher risk products like short-term exposures are also a no-no for financial planners, at least for now. They don't have a track record yet.

Also, just having a higher risk does not mean that they will deliver better than simple products, said Singh. For equity exposure two, simplicity again dominates. Singh recommends going with simple index funds for equity exposure, Nifty 50 and Nifty Next 50 for large caps and Nifty Midcap 150 for midcaps. For large caps, all financial planners recommend passive index products given the weak track record of active lodgecaps in beating their benchmarks. But some are fine with the active mutual funds for midcaps

where they see potential for alpha or excess returns over the benchmarks. Small caps, that's a no from Singh and most other financial planners. Raugi says that he has stopped recommending small-cap funds for over two years now. Some like Doseja are not recommending even mid-caps now and sticking with large-cap value-oriented funds considering valuations in the market. Raghav, on the other hand, thinks that mid-caps and small-cap funds offer opportunities at this point. He says, unlike 2024, there is no FOMO-driven rally in such stocks now. He prefers a mix of passive and active funds in these.

What all the RIAs or registered investment advisors agree on is that gold is part of the portfolio. Gold will likely continue to rally because there is just too much uncertainty in the world, said Doseja. Gold is a hedge not just against these, but also against repeat depreciation. From 10% to 20%, the ideal allocation of the yellow metal in the portfolio varies among financial planners who recommend using the surplus to rebalance towards the right mix. The way to buy gold? Gold funds or gold ETFs. Mainly because sovereign gold bonds or SGBs are no longer scalable and jewelry is a suboptimal way to invest. Also, silver, despite its run-up, is not being recommended as an investment.

Silver prices can be negatively affected if industrial demand is hit by a global recession or slowdown, says Doseager. Next, what to do with debt? Here, opinions diverge. Some like Rago even recommend against investing the surplus in fixed income instruments at this point. He explained that the returns of such investments adjusted for inflation are getting hurt by the repeat depreciation. But others think that fixed income instruments should be in the reckoning to offer stability to portfolios. Singh said, the surplus can be used to top the debt portion of the portfolio as needed. For fixed income, financial planners recommend plain vanilla debt funds such as liquid funds and money market funds for short-term needs and corporate bond funds and guilt funds for longer-term requirements.

Doseja says that income plus arbitrage funds launched over the past year or so are also options for tax-efficient debt-like returns if the holding period is over two years. The financial planners are not sold on the good old fixed deposits. Interest is taxable annually, says Saraghi. In contrast, debt fund returns are taxable only on redemption. That said, the experts are kosher with investing the surplus in simple, safe, small-saving investments offered by the post office and banks. For instance, the senior citizen savings scheme for the elderly, Sukanya Samriddi-Joujana for girls' children, and the Public Provident Fund or

PPP for everyone, offer healthy, often tax-efficient returns. These are good building blocks in the portfolio, says to Seger. For those seeking regular payouts and better returns than bank fds in the current falling interest market, government floating rate saving bonds or FRSBs are a good choice too. In any case, the financial planners recommend against riskier debt funds that take duration calls, playing on interest rate price movements and high-risk credit funds where interests may be higher, but there is a risk of debt default. They also caution against investing the surplus at random,

calling for a well-thought-out plan for it. The next advice is start with the investor, not the instrument. Before deploying any surplus, advisors insist on the basics. A six-month emergency fund, adequate term and health insurance, estate planning, wills, nominations, account structures, prepayment of costly loans. Only then should surplus money be sluble. slotted into goal-based portfolios, education, wedding, retirement, travel, charity, the like. Saraghi is clear that any deployment of surplus will depend on the two tenets of asset allocation

that he follows for his clients. Goals-based and strategic, which lays out the asset allocation mix for the goals. So, if there is a shortage in the portfolio of any specific goal, say education, the surplus will be used to top it up. The choice of asset and instrument will demonstrate depend on the strategic asset allocation for the goal and its time horizon. For instance, if children's higher education is 7 to 10 years away, 100% of the surplus will be deployed in equity. If it is within 5 years, it will be deployed in debt. Saraghi says, and I'm quoting,

I never do tactical asset allocations for my client even with surpluses. Strategic asset allocation for goals with annual or event-based rebalancing will deliver much better results in the long run. The size of the portfolio and the surplus also play a role. What is the investor's income, cash flow and financial position? What does 1 lakh or 10 lakh or 1 crore rupees really mean for the overall portfolio? Raghav says, say an investor's portfolio size is 5 crore rupees and he has a surplus of 1 lakh rupees, it will not move the needle and the deployment can be quick and straightforward.

But if a person with a portfolio of 5 lakh rupees has to deploy a surplus of 1 lakh rupees, the asset allocation can change significantly and needs to be thought through more deeply. Singh recommends that if the surplus is relatively large, the money in equity should be invested, not at one go, but in installments over, say, six months. Does the client have any specific request to deploy the surplus is also something Rago considers? does their situation allow them to. It is not a rule but it is a decent place to start. Income and wealth and therefore surplus tend to rise with age.

Someone in their 20s may be deciding what to do with 1 lakh rupees. In their 30s and early 40s, the question often shifts to 10 lakh rupees. By the time the investors cross 45, the surplus under consideration can run into 1 crore Assuming the basics are in place, emergency funds, insurance and gold-based portfolios, the question then becomes how surplus money at each of these levels usually gets put to work over five to ten-year horizon. Individual situations differ, especially true for the money with a surplus of say one crore rupees. Not just the money, their risk appetite is different too. Such in Jen, the executive vice president at Trigen Wealth, which advises family offices,

said that there are multiple offbeat things the rich can do once the portfolio basics have been taken care of. The next is rich people problems, rich people solutions. Jen says that the solutions for someone with one crore rupees are very different from those that apply to someone with a surplus of say 1 lakh or 10 lakh rupees. If the rich investor can stay put for long, say 8 to 10 years and has a high-risk appetite,

Jen recommends a private equity fund to deploy the 1-crawr in. unlisted companies. On the other hand, if the money is needed in, say, up to five years or so, and or the risk appetite is somewhat lower, Jen suggests private credit fund that lends to private companies. Both the private equity and private credit funds are AIF category two, vehicles, with a minimum investment of one crore rupees, making them out of reach for those with lower surpluses. The return expectations, post-fee and pre-tax, will vary. About 15 to 16% annual coupon rate in the private credit fund, which gives out quarterly interest payments and about 20 to 22 in the private equity fund, which aims for exits through

mergers and acquisitions, IPOs or secondary market sales. These expected high returns, of course, come with the high risk of debt defaults and equity bets not paying off. Some companies in the equity AIF will go bust, some will be multi-baggers, And that's how it works, says Jen. The private debt, he said, is secured against land, shares of the company, plant and machinery, so on. Jen says that in my experience so far, the debt has been received, the returns have been delivered, but choose the fund and your risk wisely. For those who seek both private debt and unlisted equity with their one-crow-rupy surplus, Jen points to some recent category two AIFs that offer a combo, so to speak. These funds give both coupon payments and upside potential from stocks, the best of both worlds,

if things go to plan, that is. Then, there are the realty bets, too, for those with deep pockets. Real estate equity funds, for one, invest in lease properties that generate rental income each year and are expected to appreciate and value after the properties are sold, typically after five years or so. Besides, there are real estate credit funds that provide secured loans to property developers for periods of 18 to 20 months. The return expectation in these category 2 AIFs can be 17 to 18% in both post-fee and pre-taxed

set-gen. These real estate funds often deal in commercial property, though some operate in the residential space too, he added. These high-risk, high-return options for H&Is, Ultra H&Is and family offices are assuming that other portfolio basics, including investment in safe, fixed instruments, and listed equity are already taken care of. The commitment for at least one-crow rupees in private equity and private debt AIFs will likely be asked for in phases over two to three years and not all at once.

For those with investment expertise, Jen even suggests that they can create their own portfolio with 10 to 15 lakh rupees invested in 7 to 10 private companies, to each their own. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters, and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rathif C.N.