Keep insurance & investment needs separate!

If investment is your primary objective, then buying traditional endowment plans is not advisable. These plans involve recurring premium commitment and second the policy lapses if you stop paying premiums due to temporary liquidity crunch. These plans have long tenures of 20 years and minimum life cover is 7-10 times the annual premium. A lower cover will mean losing out on tax benefits and a larger cover will eat into your returns due to higher mortality charges. Most of these policies do not give more than 5-6 % returns which means they don’t even beat inflation. Hence it's important to keep your insurance & investment needs separate always.