Investing For Young Indians

Consider age-appropriate diversified asset spread including equity for longterm goals, debt for emergency funds and liquid assets, advises Motilal Oswal.

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Half of our country’s population hasn’t placed 25 candles on their birthday cake yet. Our country is slated to be the youngest by 2020 with an average age of 29 years (37 for China, 48 for Japan), as per the projections of United Nations. A bulk of the current workforce is also formed by young Indians, who are under 35 years of age. Being the ones attaining highest educational qualifications of all generations so far and the first ones to tap their fingers on computers, their investment habits are tad different from previous generations. 

Since their education aspirations have been high, they are encumbered with immense student loans and even unemployment in select economies facing the wrath of recession. Author and economist Jeremy Rifkin, rightly refers to them as the renter generation pointing, “25 years from now, car sharing will be the norm and car ownership an anomaly.” Though a small set of the under 35 are also the youngest billionaires (Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, cofounders of Facebook were born in 1984), many others rue about unmet career expectations and low satisfaction as they seek work-life balance.

Even as the current set of octogenarians in the country switched from telegrams to public and later private telephones, and aging parents evolved to mobile phones, while the youth took to smart phones and internet telephony, the investment habits are still stuck in the telegram era.