Investing in Mutual Funds through MF House Website or Broker Website?

If you directly invest from the websites of the Mutual Fund houses, and select Direct Plans, you will save 1% commission that would otherwise go to the Broker Site. But, the advantage with the Broker is, they will handle all the paper work for all the Mutual Funds, and you need to do one time paper work with the broker web site.

If you want get best of both, you can do one thing. Create an account with FundsIndia [It is free]. From that, invest for Rs.500 in tax saving MF of all the Mutual Fund Houses that you want (like Axis, Reliance, HDFC, Birla Sunlife etc.). When you do this, FundsIndia does the paper work for all the mutual fund houses, and they open an account in each of those. Once Folio number is created, you can create an online account in all the MF websites with that Folio Number. With that online account, you can start investing in Direct Plans. By this, with single time paper work, you can invest in any no.of Mutual fund houses, and also you will not lose 1%.

The Tax saving MF is locked for 3 years. You can invest in other Mutual Funds also, but, the minimum for others is Rs.5000.