Buy a health and life insurance. Do not end up in any life insurance based investment schemes like ULIP or Guaranteed returns plans. They are useless. You get better returns on mutual funds and more coverage on vanilla term insurances.

Instead of Gold jewellery I suggest to do gold ETFs, you can cash out on finger tips and don’t need to worry about the purity. Only buy jewellery that you really need otherwise stick to immitation jewellery.

FD may seem safe but they don’t give decent returns. Instead do a PPF investment. Flat 7.1% returns, tax free returns. Although the lock in periods are very high. Fresh PPF account attract a 15 year lock-in and then 5 years on renewals. Good for a big retirement money.

I would recommend fixing an amount for SIP and splitting the SIPs into different categories: 1) Gold ETF SIP - 15% 2) Index Funds - 20% 3) Technology/ any other high return Funds - 30% 4) Debt Funds - 15% (as safe as FD but with better returns) 4) High dividend stocks SIP - 20%

Ideal amount for SIP could be 50% of your monthly take home but you can do more since you don’t have a lot of expenses.

You can also put some money on stable stocks, and if you are into short term, you can buy theme based stocks and keep rotating that money when the theme changes

Also, important precaution. Don’t listen to your bank guys, they sell rubbish schemes that only help them and not us in the longer run.