Somebody hands me a statement, or turns a phone screen towards me, and waits. What they're waiting for is a verdict on the schemes. Are these good ones. Should I change anything. And I know from the first thirty seconds that the schemes are almost never the thing worth talking about.
So here's the order I actually go in, which I've never written down before and which might be more useful to you than any opinion I'd have about a particular fund.
First: is anything actually running?
Before anything else, I check whether the instalments are going through.
It sounds trivial. It isn't. I've found SIPs that stopped fourteen months earlier when a salary account closed, and nobody noticed because nobody was looking at the transactions, only at the value. The value went up anyway, because markets did, and that hid it completely.
So: recent entries, in the last three months, on each folio. If they're missing, that's the whole meeting and we don't need to discuss schemes at all. Our post on a missed SIP payment covers what it looks like on the page.
Second: is this everything?
Whatever I'm shown is usually not the whole picture, and it's rarely deliberate.
People show me the app they use. What's missing is the folio from 2016 bought through a bank, the one a relative set up, the one in a spouse's name. So I ask for a consolidated statement against the PAN rather than working from the app, which our page on the consolidated account statement explains.
Roughly half the time something turns up. Sometimes a small forgotten holding, occasionally something substantial that had been quietly running for a decade.
Third: what is this money for?
This is the question that actually decides everything and it's the one people find oddest.
They came to talk about schemes and I'm asking about their daughter's age and whether they're planning to buy anything in the next few years. But there's no way to have an opinion about a holding without knowing when the money is needed, and a scheme that's perfect for a fifteen-year goal is wrong for a two-year one.
Frequently the honest answer is "no particular reason, it's just savings". That's fine and it's still worth knowing, because it means nothing here has a date attached and nothing needs de-risking yet.
Fourth: is there a buffer?
Separate from everything on the statement. Money sitting somewhere reachable that nobody counts as an investment.
If there isn't one, that's the finding. Not the fund selection. A household with a good portfolio and no buffer will eventually redeem at a bad moment for an ordinary reason, and everything we discussed about scheme quality will have been irrelevant. Our page on building an emergency fund covers the amount.
I ask about expensive debt in the same breath, because a credit card balance running alongside an investment portfolio is the same problem wearing different clothes.
Fifth: what does the whole thing add up to?
Now I look at the holdings, but not one by one. As a total.
How much of this is in equity and how much is in something stable. And crucially, counting the things people leave off: the provident fund, the deposits, any shares held directly, the equity portion inside a hybrid scheme.
Almost every household is surprised by this number in one direction or the other. People who thought they were aggressive find they're conservative once the provident fund is counted, and people who felt safe discover their split drifted a long way while a category was doing well. Our page on asset allocation is what that number should have been set by.
Sixth, finally: the schemes
And even here, I'm not asking whether each one is good. I'm asking three narrower things.
Do these hold the same companies? Six schemes that all lead with the same names isn't a portfolio, it's one position bought six times, which our page on portfolio overlap covers.
Does each one do a job the others don't? If I can't say what a holding is for, it's usually there because somebody suggested it once.
Is anything wildly out of place? A sector scheme holding a third of the portfolio. A long-horizon goal sitting in something built for parking. Those are worth naming.
What I don't do is rank them. Two sensible schemes in the same category, held for fifteen years, won't produce outcomes different enough to justify the anxiety, and our post on why we never name a fund explains why I won't do that part anyway.
The details I check while I'm there
Not glamorous, and they cause more actual trouble than scheme selection ever does.
The mobile number on each folio. An old one stops everything at the moment you need it to work, and it's the single most common reason a request stalls.
The bank account. Usually the one attached to a job somebody left. It's fine until a redemption, and then it isn't.
The nominee. Present or absent, and whether it still says what the household wants it to say.
Ten minutes, and it saves a family a great deal later. Our page on how a folio works lists the rest of what sits on the record.
What I almost never say
Sell this one, buy that one.
Partly because it's not my role, and partly because in most of these conversations the schemes weren't the problem. I've reviewed portfolios where every holding was perfectly reasonable and the household was still in a bad position, because there was no buffer and half the money had a two-year date attached.
And the reverse. Portfolios full of things I'd never have suggested, held by somebody who'd kept going for eleven years without interfering, doing perfectly well.
The thing that predicts the outcome
If I could only ask one question, it wouldn't be on this list at all.
It's what you did the last time something you owned fell. Not how you'd describe your appetite for risk, which everybody answers optimistically. What you actually did, in that month, with that money.
Somebody who sat through 2020 without stopping is in a completely different situation from somebody who redeemed, regardless of what either of them currently holds. The first person can hold more equity than they think. The second should hold less than they say they want, and there's no shame in that.
The two findings that come up most
If I had to name what actually turns up in these conversations, it's these two, and neither is about a fund being poor.
Too many schemes doing one job. Seven holdings, three of which are genuinely different. Usually accumulated one suggestion at a time over a decade with nobody ever looking at the collection as a whole.
A date nobody planned for. Money needed in eighteen months sitting in an equity scheme, because it was invested when the date was seven years away and nothing was done as it approached. That one is the most expensive and the most avoidable, and our page on when to sell covers planning the exit in advance.
Neither needs a dramatic response. The first is usually fixed by stopping new money going into the duplicates rather than by selling anything.
How to do this yourself
The whole thing takes an hour and you don't need me for most of it.
Pull a consolidated statement. Check the last three months of transactions on each folio. Write down what each holding is for and when the money's needed. Add up the stable side and the growth side including everything. Then look at the top ten holdings of each scheme side by side.
If all of that comes back fine, there's nothing to do, which is the answer most years and the one nobody enjoys hearing.
If you'd rather somebody went through it with you, that's ordinary work here and there's no charge for looking at what exists. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) working from Indore since 2014.
