Life came to a standstill for Nisha Millett, a professional swimmer, and her husband, Bikranjit Floyd Chatterjee, when Covid brought their swimming academy to a grinding halt. liquidation of a part of them debt fund Investments earmarked for emergencies, and dipping into his business reserves helped him tide over tough times.
Bajra is an Arjuna Award winner and was the only woman in India’s 2000 Sydney Olympic swimming team. The couple runs the Nisha Millets Swimming Academy in Bengaluru, which was started almost 20 years ago after Millet retired as an active player.
Mint reached out to the couple and Dipesh Mehta, who has been guiding them on their investments since 2017 to understand their personal finance journey. Mehta is a qualified certified financial planner and AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor.
learn from the past
Talking about the drive behind starting her academy, Millet says she wanted to make swimming a fun learning experience, which was very different from her experience as a child. Also, her parents did not plan their personal finances well. She remembers how she sold her house and spent all the money on her swimming career, not leaving enough for herself. This made Bajra realize the importance of a retirement fund so that she does not have to depend financially on her children.
Saving enough to finance the careers of their 8-year-old twin daughters, Adele and Ariana, is another major financial objective for the couple. They would like to set aside some money to buy the house later.
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Unlike their parents, they don’t shy away from teaching their little daughters some money lessons. When the Covid outbreak struck, he talked to his daughters about how business was not doing well and that they didn’t want to use their savings for things like holidays. “Kids need to understand that finances have their ups and downs and that they also have less to do with what they need,” says Millett.
sailing through tough times
The last two years have been tough for him both in terms of his business as well as personally, as Chatterjee lost his mother. Mehta’s suggestion of putting some money in debt funds came in handy. A combination of withdrawals from his trading reserves, liquidating debt fund investments and cutting expenses worked for him. He had 12 months’ expenses in debt funds emergency funds,
Mehta also asked them to increase their health and life insurance cover. Today, Bajra and her husband have a 2 crore life insurance cover, and a comprehensive health cover for the family ( 6 Lakh Sum Insured Plus 15 lakh critical illness cover). Thankfully, he did not have to use his health cover during Kovid. He has also resisted the urge to take any loan so far.
disciplined spending, investment
On the business front, Chatterjee explains that around 60% of his revenue comes during the summer months and 40% from the rest of the year. Both the Kovid waves affected him badly in the summer. Now, they are back at 85-90% of their pre-Covid revenue and have tightened employee payments and overheads to improve their profitability. Given that he ran his own business, the first thing Mehta did was to identify his risk taking ability.
“We are responsible for four people, our kids and our parents, so we don’t like to take too much risk in our investments,” says Millet. “We don’t have a fancy office and we work from home. Keep our overheads low,” she adds.
Mehta says that except for the period March 2020-22, the couple has been regularly investing 30% of their savings in mutual funds. Debt funds comprise 15%, hybrid funds 20% and diversified equity funds comprise 65% of their corpus. “We have never seen gold as a serious investment, except for a few occasional purchases,” says Chatterjee. Mehta says he wanted them to invest 5-10% in gold and international funds by the end of 2020, but he didn’t. There is no money for this.
According to Mehta, the only thing left for the family is to write a will. Since the couple had to close their mutual fund SIPs for two years, they expect a delay of a few years to buy the house.
watch their back
Millet says her husband was initially refusing to seek professional help to manage his finances, now that he is glad he has someone watching his back. In the past, they were products sold wrongly by their bank. Bajra says he is well aware of what Mehta is doing for his investments and does not question his decision. “You have to have that level of confidence and not micromanage,” she adds.