How this small-town dentist couple set their personal finance goals

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₹15.11 lakh when I started my practice. I needed money for setting up my dental clinic and also for meeting my personal financial goals," Akshat Agarwal says. Gondia is also known as ‘Rice City’ due to the abundance of rice mills in the area.

“People mostly invest in land and when they need money get into informal lending at a high interest rate. I did not want to do it," he says. After consultation with relatives and friends, Agarwal ended up investing in more than 10 mutual fund schemes.

He also created a stock portfolio. “One of my friends connected me with a mutual fund distributor (MFD) who made me start systematic investment plans (SIPs) in mutual funds. A relative later told me that distributors get commission from mutual fund companies .My distributor had not shared details of the schemes in which I had invested.

I did not know that I could track these investments by myself," he says. Meanwhile, Agarwal lost about ₹50,000 after dabbling in the stock markets in 2021. “I was clueless about how to set things right and I needed somebody to guide me," he says.

A random google search landed him on the website of SahajMoney, a financial planning firm founded by registered investment adviser (RIA) Abhishek Kumar. Agarwal had no idea about Sebi-registered RIAs or fixed-fee financial planning model till then. To be sure, RIAs are authorized to impart unbiased financial advice and barred from earning commissions from the sale of financial products.

“When I came to know that RIAs only charge a fixed fee for the advisory, I was impressed," he says. Personalized guidance was another big plus. “I had always preferred a personal tutor over coaching classes.