“My father had supported me with ₹1 lakh. I began my practice in a rented clinic that cost ₹6,000 a month. I used to commute daily on my scooter from my village to the city,” he recalls.
Petrol was ₹40-50 a litre then. “I would often hope I had at least enough patients in a day to cover just my monthly fuel expenses.”
Patil understood the value of investing early on. He had seen how his father’s limited investments, despite years of service as a teacher, left the family struggling after retirement. He made his own investment decisions with little guidance. However, this lack of guidance led him to make several investment mistakes, eventually leading him to turn to a financial planner.
Having witnessed his father struggle after retirement despite years of service as a teacher, Patil understood the importance of investing early. But with little guidance, his early decisions were riddled with several missteps. That is when he turned to a financial planner.
Early mistakes
Patil, who is now based in Sangli, Maharashtra, hails from a humble background, growing up in Tasgaon. His initial experiences with investing pushed him into subpar investment products and even a fraudulent scheme.
In his early years, he invested in a firm that promised 10% monthly returns through the stock market. The arrangement was simple: an investment of ₹1 lakh fetched ₹10,000 a month; raise it to ₹1.1 lakh, and the payout became ₹11,000, and so on. After two or three months of regular payouts, investors were coaxed into rolling back their returns into the scheme, with the lure of compounding at the same ‘10% monthly return’.
Patil sensed something was amiss and managed to pull out his entire ₹30 lakh investment before the scheme collapsed. “Out of curiosity, I had once asked the firm’s relationship manager how they could sustain such high returns. He admitted that after receiving payouts for two or three months, most investors stopped withdrawing their money, believing that leaving it locked in would allow compounding to work in their favour,” he recalls.
That explanation made him suspect something was off. “It seemed like a scheme where the initial payouts were simply bait to reassure investors.”
Over the years, Patil channelled much of his surplus into real estate, especially plots of land. While this built up his assets, it also tied up a large part of his wealth in illiquid holdings.
Another mistake was buying multiple insurance policies pushed by bank officials. “Whenever I approached the bank for a loan — whether for my home, hospital construction, or land purchases — the officials would insist I also take an investment-linked insurance policy,” he says.
He admits he didn’t know any better at the time, coming from a traditional background where his family had little understanding of financial investments and believed only physical assets were safe. He was drawn to those insurance policies because they seemed secure, with the promise of a ‘guaranteed’ maturity amount at the end of the term.
Taking corrective steps
Although Patil had built a strong financial position through his medical practice, he often struggled to arrange cash for sudden obligations. “There was a lack of planning, which created unnecessary stress whenever payments were due. For instance, with advance tax, I would often scramble at the last minute to arrange funds, since running the hospital and meeting staff salaries were already capital-intensive,” he recalls.
Patil first encountered the concept of financial planning in 2015, but by then his past investing missteps had left him sceptical. “When I first met Nitin Sawant (founder of NS Wealth, a Sebi-registered investment advisory firm) through a friend, he advised me to close all my insurance policies immediately.”
He hesitated at first. “I had already paid hefty premiums over the years and wasn’t convinced about surrendering them before maturity. Trust didn’t come easily to me at that stage,” he admits.
He recalls that Sawant and his team pointed out how the returns from these policies weren’t keeping up with inflation, which made him understand that he may have been wrongly pushed into these policies.
For the next five to six years, Patil didn’t contact Sawant. It was only after attending a lecture on holistic financial planning by Sawant that he was finally convinced to work with him. The session struck a chord, and after a few initial meetings, he finally got on board in 2023. He adds that the fact that Sawant was registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) him the confidence to gradually build trust.
Finally, getting it right
Earlier, Patil had no structured plan to achieve his short-term, medium-term, or long-term goals. Now, each of these is clearly mapped out and aligned to his financial strategy.
He is working towards building a retirement corpus with the help of his financial planner. He has already achieved around 40% of his corpus target. Patil had earmarked ₹50 lakh from one of his investments for his son’s MBBS education. But when his son secured admission to AIIMS, where the fees were minimal, that investment remained untouched.
“I had a health cover of ₹5 lakh and was considering raising it to ₹20–50 lakh, but the premiums were prohibitively high. That’s when my financial planner (Sawant) suggested a super top-up, something I wasn’t aware of. Under this, the first ₹5 lakh was covered by my existing policy, the super top-up of ₹45 lakh would kick in once it gets exhausted,” he says.
A super top-up is a cost-effective way to enhance a health cover — instead of paying high premiums for a large base policy, you keep a modest base cover and add a bigger layer of protection on top, which kicks in only after the base limit is crossed. Patil had a term life cover of ₹1 crore and is planning to increase it to ₹5 crore.
As a medical professional, Patil also holds a professional indemnity cover of ₹50 lakh, which protects him against legal and financial risks arising from his practice. For doctors, this cover is essential as it safeguards them from potential liabilities in case of patient disputes or claims of negligence.
He has loans on his hospital and home, but his financial planner has advised against prepaying them, as keeping his money invested could generate higher returns than the interest he pays on these loans.
Over time, he has closed all his insurance policies and redirected his money into equity and debt mutual funds to meet long-term goals. This has balanced his asset allocation, reducing the weight of illiquid holdings and giving his portfolio the much-needed liquidity.
Before financial planning, Patil’s portfolio was heavily skewed, with nearly 89% locked in real estate. Today, the share has come down to around 60%. In contrast, equity mutual funds—once completely absent —now make up 23% of his portfolio, while debt mutual funds account for another 13%.
Unlike earlier, when he had no financial plan for future expenses, Patil now maps out his spending with his financial planner. “Every quarter, we have a review meeting. In the final quarter of the financial year, we again review the expenses incurred over the year to identify which were recurring and which were not. We plan for one-time expenses I may have in mind, such as a foreign trip or a major purchase,” he says.
Takeaways
Investing is not merely about chasing the highest possible returns. That approach, as Patil’s experience shows, can push you into unsuitable products or even fraudulent schemes. Financial planning goes beyond returns — it is about creating a structured strategy to secure your financial future.
This means aligning investments with your long-, medium-, and short-term goals, maintaining the right balance between growth and liquidity, and ensuring adequate protection through insurance and other tools. As Patil’s story shows, it is also never too late to start a financial plan and move in the right direction.