You may already own more safe money than you think
PPF, deposits and an insurance-cum-savings policy are all safe money. Count them before adding more, or you end up far more cautious than you intended.
When somebody shows me what they hold, the safe money is almost always spread across places they think of separately. A PPF account from years ago. Two deposits at the bank. A policy a relative sold them in 2014 that pays out at maturity. Some money in the provident fund at work.
Each one was opened on its own, for its own reason, and is remembered on its own. Added together, they are often most of what the person owns — and they had no idea, because nobody ever adds them up.
This page is about doing that addition before you add anything new. It names no scheme and tells you nothing to buy.
What counts as safe money
Anything where the amount you get back does not depend on how shares behave. Broadly:
These behave differently from one another. The lock-ins differ, the tax differs, how fast you can reach the money differs. But they share the one feature that matters here: equities do not drive what they return.
Why nobody adds them up
Because each one was a separate event.
The PPF was opened because somebody said you should have one. The deposit was a bonus you did not want to spend. The policy was sold to you by a relative who had just joined an agency. The provident fund happens automatically and you have never looked at the balance.
None of it was a decision about your portfolio. It was a sequence of unconnected moments, and nothing in the system ever brings them onto one page.
What goes wrong when you do not
A person comes in holding a PPF account, a provident fund balance, two deposits and an endowment policy. Nearly all of their money is safe money. They then start investing, and are offered a mix of equity and debt, as most people are, because a mix sounds prudent.
So they add debt to a pile that is already almost entirely debt.
Nobody did anything wrong at any point. The mix inside the new investment was sensible in isolation. But their overall position is now far more cautious than they ever chose, and they do not know it, because the new investment is the only part anyone showed them a pie chart of.
This is why, when somebody already holds a good amount of safe money outside, I do not automatically add a debt leg to the funds they hold with me. The safety is already there. Putting more beside it is not caution, it is duplication — and over a long holding, duplicated caution has a cost you only notice at the end.
Your portfolio is everything you own, not the part of it that happens to be on the statement in front of you.
And the other way round
The same mistake runs in reverse, and it is the more dangerous one.
Somebody with no safe money anywhere — no deposit, no PPF, nothing they can reach in a week — can be entirely in equity and feel fine, because the market has been kind. Then the car needs work, or a job ends, and the only money available is the money that has just fallen.
Having something boring to draw on is what stops you selling the rest at the worst moment. That is its job. It is not there to grow.
Doing the addition
One sheet of paper. Twenty minutes.
Adding up what you already hold
- Write down every safe holding. Current balance against each: PPF, provident fund, each deposit, each post office account, the maturity value of each policy, any debt fund, the idle money in your savings account.
- Write down the equity. Equity funds, any shares you hold directly, the equity portion of a mixed fund if you can find it.
- Add each column and work out the share. Safe money as a percentage of the total. That single number is the thing almost nobody knows about themselves.
- Compare it with what you intended. If you thought you were seventy per cent in equity and the sheet says thirty, you have learned something no app was going to tell you.
- Note when each one unlocks. A PPF you cannot touch for nine more years is safety, but it is not money you can reach next month. Those are different jobs.
Step five is the one people skip, and it matters. Safe and reachable are not the same property. A fifteen-year lock-in and a bank deposit maturing next month are both safe, and only one of them is any use in an emergency.
Before adding anything, add up what you have. The question is not “should I hold some debt?” It is “how much do I already hold, and can I reach it when I need it?”
What this does not mean
It does not mean cancel anything. Surrendering an insurance-cum-savings policy part way through usually means taking a poor value, and breaking a deposit or a PPF has its own rules and costs. Knowing your position is not a reason to dismantle it.
It does not mean a particular split is right for you. I have deliberately given no target number, because the right balance depends on your goals, how long you have and what you can live through — and a web page knows none of that about you.
What it does mean is that the sum is worth knowing before the next decision, rather than after several more.
Where to check things for yourself
A reasonable next step is not a purchase. It is the sheet of paper: everything safe in one column, everything in equity in the other, and the maturity dates written beside them. Most people are surprised by the answer, and the surprise is the useful part.