Kiran Yadav – How to Fund your Child’s Education

Vivek Law: Hello and welcome to this special series - Finance Made Simple. Joining me today is Kiran Yadav who's the Chief People Officer at Canara HSBC Life Insurance. Thank you very much, Kiran, for joining us in this series. Kiran, there is a lot of emphasis and focus and you know it better than anyone else on upskilling, reskilling. It's not enough to have graduated in a particular subject or on your postgraduate degree in another subject. These are times when you need to constantly upgrade your learning capabilities. The challenge that comes is that some of these mid-career learning programs, education programs can be fairly expensive. How do you advise mid-career people or early-career people to be able to save up to fund this education?

Kiran Yadav: I look at your question in two-three ways if you're okay. One is funding for self. Well, in India people still depend on their parents to do that. That's my experience. It's difficult to accumulate enough in the first two or three years of your job to go say abroad to study et cetera. So, you depend on either bank loans or you look at your family to support you on that. It's honestly difficult to accumulate that kind of money. However, a lot of organizations are now supporting these aspirations and dreams for people. Because of a large number of people that we can train together, so organizations support. You could be lucky and getting to get to work in an organization that can support your long-term dream of education or as I said in your initial years you'll have to take support from family or banks. Mid-term when you're there in your career it may be possible and maybe viable to have saved up enough through various instruments of insurance or other money matters which could help you sponsor yourself for a course that may be expensive. I would like to however tweak the question a little bit and say the bigger worry that people have today is to sponsor their kids' education because education today has become very expensive even at the schooling level. So, it's not anymore about higher education. It's about school education as well and sponsoring funding children is expensive. So, I would like to give a little bit of input based on the experience that we have in the insurance sector. Another tweak to that is how you would ensure that your kids are funded well even if you are not there. That is the important thing which sometimes we don't plan that way but we should. If you want to ensure that whether you're there or not there and god forbid your kids' education is not compromised and that I highly encourage every single person to plan for that. You need to have a long-term plan. For example, whether it's 10 years or 15 years when you're going to need that money and you have to back work on it and see how you'll start investing today as your salaries increase, your proportion increase and how much you're going to be able to invest more and more. So, back work and plan today - how would you plan your kids' education. The good part with it is with insurance is that a lot of it is tax-free. So, you have those benefits. Secondly, the best part is that even if you are not there and if you've planned well for your children, their education will not be compromised, through lump sums and monthly installments or depending on your milestones that you've planned for your children, all of it would be honored by the insurance company if you've invested in the right child plan. So, education today can be taken care of with good planning if parents can give that time to buy the right insurance plan for their children, building the appropriate milestones, and stick to their long-term plan it can really be beneficial for their kids' higher education.

Vivek: Alright, thank you very much Kiran for joining me today and sharing your perspective with our viewers. I appreciate you taking the time out. Thank you.

Kiran: Thank you, it's been my pleasure.