How to plan for your child’s schooling costs and other financial goals

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₹60-70 lakh to raise a child in the first 20 to 22 years after birth. This is a considerable cost you will incur as a parent before retiring. A significant financial event, aside from retirement, is educating and raising a child.

An infant requires constant attention, nutritious food, and medical care during its first few years. As the child gets older, costs for clothes and education begin to rise, but those for health care generally begin to decline. As clothing becomes more useful with age, clothing costs gradually reduce.

The costs start to soar as the youngster enters high school (or the secondary class, from class 8 onward), then transfers to college for professional courses and higher education. So, how should you tackle these expenses? Saving and investing is a great solution. A systematic, disciplined, and rationalized approach to investing is essential when discussing saving via investing.

All the significant expenses for your child must be budgeted first. Using a logical approach, one must prioritize the costs and divide them into short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives. Short-term goals require significant capital protection and could occur anytime during the year.

For instance, a corpus for medical emergencies for children. Medium-term goals are usually more than three years away. For instance, while budgeting for an infant’s school expenses, a parent considers play-school costs as a medium-term goal.

Long-term goals are those goals where you have time on your side. This will include undergrad college tuition, postgraduate fees, and school fees for grades VIII through XII (assuming you are planning when the child is a baby). After classifying the expenditure by priority and time frame, one should