Investing for your child's education

School education costs are not much of a worry for parents. They are able to pay fees on a monthly or quarterly basis without putting a strain on their finances. However, when it comes to higher education, the situation is pretty different. The cost of higher education is quite high and you need this money within a stipulated time period. Hence, accumulating a sufficient corpus for the higher education of kids is one of the major financial goals for all parents. Failing to achieve any other goal, for example a foreign vacation, may make you feel sad for a while but failing to provide adequate monetary support for the higher education of your child could be really heartbreaking and a lifetime regret. Planning acts as the cornerstone of achieving any long-term financial goal successfully. How much you will have in your kitty after a certain period of time is a mathematical function of how much you are able to invest every month and the kind of return that your investment is able to generate. An online calculator can do this job quite well. Just enter the target amount, assume the rate of inflation and return, and the calculator will tell you how much you need to invest every month. But when you plan for your child's higher education-a long-term financial goal-this simple task becomes more complex. This is because it is very difficult to give a precise number to the target corpus amount. You don't know whether your four- or five-year-old kid would become an engineer, a doctor,

This article was originally published on November 14, 2020.