Managing rebalancing costs – The Hindu

Systematic investment plans (SIPs) make the process of investing in equity funds easy. You must, however, rebalance investments through time horizon for a life goal. Rebalancing involves costs. In this article, we discuss a process to reduce such costs.

Diverting SIP

Rebalancing goal-based portfolios typically involves selling some units in equity funds and investing proceeds in bank deposits. This cuts the risk of losing all unrealised gains in equity portfolio should the market decline.

Previously in this column, we suggested you can keep a threshold beyond which you could decide to annually rebalanceyour equity investments. The threshold can be determined as your expected pre-tax annual return on equity investments plus 1%. But selling units has associated costs. If equity investments are held for more than a year, you must pay long-term capital gains tax should capital gains exceed ₹1.25 lakh in a financial year.

Capital gains tax

If you sell investments held for less than one year, you must pay short-term capital gains tax of 20% and incur a penalty levied by the asset management company for redeeming units within one year from the date of investing. There is an alternative. Suppose you have ₹1 crore in your equity fund, a SIP of ₹30,000 and you expect 12% annual return. Further suppose you have 15% unrealised gains in your fund. Instead of selling units for ₹3 lakh (excess return of 3% on ₹1 crore), you can keep the unrealised gains and divert the intended equity SIP to a recurring deposit for 10 months. There are, however, some factors you must consider. One, your SIP in equity must always be for 12 months at a time so that you review and adjust the SIP for the coming year based on the rebalancing requirement. Two, your unrealised gains are at risk till the time you exhaust the diverted SIP amount. And three, you must restart the SIP on the equity fund after you complete the recurring deposit.

Conclusion

The SIP-diversion alternative is more involved than a rebalancing process. You may still have to sell units in your equity fund starting five years from the time horizon for a life goal. This is because you should cut your equity investments to reduce the risk that the market could decline closer to the end of the time horizon for a life goal and hurt your goal.

(The author offers training programmes for individuals to manage their personal investments)