Even before Prime Minister Modi thought of demonetisation, going digital with your investments was a sound idea. While shares have been held in dematerialised form for many years now, bonds, NCDs, mutual fund units and Sovereign Gold Bonds have moved to the demat mode in the last couple of years. The benefits of holding your financial assets in electronic, dematerialised form are many.
For one, they are safer that way and you need not worry about theft, forgery, loss or misuse. Two, owning assets in electronic form also makes them portable and non-location specific. Floods may damage the property documents stored in your bank locker. But acts of god simply do not affect the dematerialised investments in the safe-keeping of NSDL or CDSL.
Three, with the depositories now providing investors with a monthly consolidated account statement, you get a single-window snapshot of your asset allocation and the marked-to-market value of your holdings with all demat assets. This makes it easy to track your portfolio.
In fact, given the advantages, it makes a lot of sense to migrate from the physical to electronic form for hard assets as well. This means switching from jewellery to demat Sovereign Gold Bonds and storing scanned copies of your property documents as a backup.
The DigiLocker facility, which has recently been rolled out by the Government of India, may soon become your default 'locker' for all key papers (https://digilocker.gov.in/faq.php). The facility is designed to store a variety of documents issued by different government departments - from your CBSE marksheet to your driving licence and RC book - in electronic format in a digital account that is password protected.
A Must-Do List for Investors
Stop idling your earnings
Re-invest your interest, dividends
Start a 'Swacch Portfolio' mission
Exit insurance-cum-investment plans
Get property insurance
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