Tirupati Rao was felicitated with MDRT Samman for his unflinching focus on retirement planning.
Visakhapatnam based Tirupati Rao has a unique way of promoting mutual fund schemes – simply positioning them as products for retirement or children’s planning. For the last 15 years, he has been helping people of Andhra Pradesh to secure their children’s future and retirement.
With over 3000 clients, Rao uses balanced funds for retirement and children planning. According to him, long term investment (15 to 20 years) in balanced funds benefits all stakeholders – AMCs, distributors and clients.
Earlier, Rao had a provisional store in Visakhapatnam. One of his friends advised him to distribute Sahara’s product to supplement his income. Very soon, he developed a keen interest in the financial markets. After a few months, he came to know about benefits of long term investments in mutual funds in a training program conducted by UTI. He then made up his mind to use MF investment as a long term tool for retirement and children’s planning.
In 1998, when Rao started off his career as a distributor, he had no concrete idea about his business plan.Initially, Rao found it difficult to convince people about the benefits of long term investment in mutual funds. He then decided to make a chart comparing mutual funds with other investment products like PPF, NSC and so on. This chart showed comparative difference in returns for 15 to 20 years. The idea worked well for him and he started getting clients. Rao recommends his clients to invest through SIP till their retirement. He says “No matter how much you are investing, the only important thing is investing regularly for long term.”
Though he has a modest educational qualification, he spreads the cause of mutual funds to highly educated people in his state. Now, he has clients from all sections of society and has asset under advisory of Rs 21 crore (95% in long term balanced fund).
Rao acquires one new client every day and aims to keep this momentum.
