Women are often told to save more, invest early and plan for retirement. But how much should actually go towards investments?
Radhika Gupta, MD & CEO of Edelweiss , has a simple answer: start with 10% of your post-tax income in your 20s, raise that to 30% in your 30s and aim for 50% in your 40s.
Speaking at the India Today Woman Summit 2026, Gupta explained what she calls the “10, 30, 50” framework for building the habit of saving and investing.
“If you’re in your 20s, start saving 10% of your post tax salary, and make sure it goes via an SIP into something,” she said.
The idea, she explained, is not just about the amount but about making investing automatic. Just as tax is deducted from a salary before the money reaches an employee, investments can also be automated through an SIP so that saving does not depend on whether there is money left at the end of the month.
Gupta recommends increasing the allocation as income and responsibilities rise. Her framework suggests 10% in the 20s, 30% in the 30s and 50% in the 40s, when retirement planning becomes more important.
Gupta also cautioned women against jumping straight into investments without first taking care of financial vulnerabilities.
Her advice is to make sure there is adequate health insurance for yourself and your family and to understand the loans and debt the family has taken on.
“Before you start to make a mountain, make sure there’s no hole at the bottom of the mountain,” she said.
That means building wealth should not come at the cost of leaving yourself exposed to a medical emergency or carrying expensive debt, particularly credit card debt.
Once those basics are taken care of, Gupta recommends thinking about a portfolio as a simple Indian thali.
Gupta uses food analogies repeatedly to explain investing, and her simplest one is the Indian thali.
A good portfolio, she says, should have different components just as a thali has different types of food. Equity, debt and gold each have a different role.
“Equity, debt, gold. That is your simple thali,” she said.
Equity is the growth component. Debt is meant to provide stability and money that can be accessed when needed, while gold can act as a diversifier in a portfolio.
Her broader point is that investors should not put everything into one asset simply because it has performed well recently.
The next question is obvious: if equity is important, how does someone who is not a stock market expert actually invest?
Gupta’s answer is mutual funds.
She compared investing directly in stocks to making biryani at home.
“Most people don’t cook biryani at home because biryani is a damn hard thing to cook. It takes 18-20 ingredients,” she said.
Mutual funds, she explained, are like a financial food court. Instead of selecting and managing every individual investment yourself, a mutual fund gives you access to a basket of investments.
“We are your financial food court, ladies. That’s all we are,” Gupta said.
There are different “dishes” for different risk appetites — equity, debt, gold and combinations of these. The investor’s job is to understand how much risk they are comfortable taking and select accordingly.
An SIP, meanwhile, is like having a regular meal plan at that food court. Instead of trying to time the market or deciding every month whether to invest, money can be invested systematically.
Gupta also wants investors to stop believing that they need to understand every mutual fund scheme available in the market.
There may be thousands of schemes and dozens of categories, but she argues that most investors can ignore much of that complexity.
She describes this as “Dal Chawal Mutual Funds” — simple, everyday investment choices that do not require an investor to constantly track what is happening in the market.
For someone looking for a relatively simple equity option, she pointed to flexi-cap funds, which invest across large, mid and small companies.
For more conservative investors, she suggested looking at hybrid or multi-asset funds, which combine different asset classes rather than requiring investors to construct each part of the portfolio themselves.
“Everything else is chutney on top,” she said.
One of the biggest sources of confusion, Gupta said, is the word “debt”.
In everyday life, debt usually means loans. In investing, debt refers to fixed-income investments designed to provide greater stability than equity.
She said every investor should have some money in safer and easily accessible investments because emergencies do not wait for the stock market to recover.
Gupta drew on her own experience to explain why.
She started investing in 2006 and was advised to put a large portion of her money into equity because she was young. When the 2008 financial crisis hit and markets fell sharply, those investments lost substantial value.
Later, when she and her husband returned to India in 2009 and needed capital to start a company, they had to withdraw from their equity investments at a loss because they did not have enough money in debt investments.
That experience made her “obsessed with debt”.
Her advice is to keep at least six months of expenses in some form of safer, accessible investment. That could include fixed deposits, PPF or other suitable fixed-income options depending on the investor’s circumstances.
The key, she said, is not necessarily the highest return.
“The critical thing is not return, it’s availability.”
For women beginning their investment journey, Gupta’s larger message is therefore quite simple: start small, automate it, diversify and don’t let complicated financial terminology become an excuse for doing nothing.
(Disclaimer: The views, opinions, recommendations, and suggestions expressed by experts/brokerages in this article are their own and do not reflect the views of the India Today Group. It is advisable to consult a qualified broker or financial advisor before making any actual investment or trading choices.)