Glossary· Costs & scheme terms
What is Exit load?
A fee charged when you redeem within a stated period.
Typically 1% if sold inside a year, though liquid and overnight funds use graded loads measured in days. Charged on the redemption amount and paid back into the scheme, so it discourages short holding rather than earning the AMC anything.
For the formula and the constants behind this figure, see Methodology.
Guides that use Exit load
18 guides put this term to work.
- What a mutual fund actually is (and why it is not a piggy bank)Who holds your money, who merely manages it, and why that separation is the whole safety architecture — plus what a NAV is, and what it is not.
- Mutual funds vs fixed deposits: which risk are you willing to see?An FD hides its risk in purchasing power; a fund puts its risk on a screen daily. Where each genuinely wins, and why most households need both.
- How mutual fund investing actually works: follow the money, liveInteractive diagrams of the whole pipeline — the route one ₹10,000 SIP takes through your platform, clearing, the AMC, the RTA and the custodian, and what each is allowed to touch.
- SIP 101: the secret weapon of disciplined investingA SIP is a standing instruction, not a product. What it genuinely does, the variants worth using, and the four things it is regularly oversold as.
- Exit load and expense ratio: the hidden costs of investingThe expense ratio split into three parts from April 2026, the caps that now apply, the charges that sit outside it — and why one percentage point can cost more than the principal.
- How to read a mutual fund factsheet like a proRead it backwards: mandate and benchmark, then holdings and concentration, then cost, then risk — and only then returns. Four minutes, in the order that matters.
- The twelve mistakes that cost first-time SIP investors the mostAlmost none of the money new investors lose goes to bad funds. It goes to plan, cost, horizon and behaviour — and every one of these is avoidable by someone who was warned.
- STP: how to deploy a lump sum without betting on one dateThe waiting money earns debt-fund returns instead of sitting in savings. What an STP actually buys — regret protection, not extra return — and why each instalment is taxable.
- SWP: creating your own monthly pensionWhy a withdrawal plan beats an IDCW payout on tax and on control, how each instalment is taxed, and the sequence risk that decides whether the money lasts.
- Portfolio rebalancing: when and why you must sell winning assetsDrift is a risk decision you never made. Bands over hunches, the execution ladder that starts with new money rather than a sale, and why the discomfort is the mechanism.
- Handling underperformance: when to stay and when to exitSeparating what changed about the fund from what changed about the market: mandate drift, manager exits, and the review habit that stops you acting on a bad quarter.
- Fund manager changes: should you panic when the captain leaves?Were you buying a person or a process? What to check immediately, what to watch for six to twelve months, and the one situation where moving quickly is free.
- Mutual fund overlap: are you really diversified?Diversification stops early and overlap starts immediately. Why the answer is four to six, how to measure the duplication you already own, and how to unwind it without a tax bill.
- How to clean up a portfolio with too many schemesFour moves in strict order: see everything, label every holding, stop the inflows, then unwind slowly across financial years using the annual exemption.
- The emergency fund: where liquid funds fit, and where they don'tIts job is to stop you selling equity in a bad month — the same month the market is down. Sizing, structure, and what liquid funds do and do not protect against.
- Building a passive income stream from mutual fundsNever through IDCW, which hands back your own capital at slab rate. An SWP taxes only the gain portion — plus the bucket structure that makes the income survive a bad market.
- Moving your funds from one platform to anotherYour platform does not hold your units, so changing apps usually transfers nothing. The distinction that costs money is a Regular-to-Direct switch, which is a redemption.
- Cut-off timings: which day's NAV you actually getRealisation of funds decides the NAV, not when you clicked. 3pm for most schemes, 1:30pm for liquid funds — and why optimising your SIP date is wasted effort.
More on costs & scheme terms
What you pay, and the rules attached to buying and selling units.
- Expense ratio
- The fund's annual running cost, as a percentage of assets.
- Direct vs Regular plan
- The same portfolio, sold with or without distributor commission built in.
- Growth vs IDCW option
- Whether gains stay invested or get paid out.
- Lock-in
- A period in which units cannot be redeemed at all.
- Stamp duty
- A flat 0.005% government levy on every mutual fund purchase.
- Minimum SIP / lumpsum
- The smallest instalment and the smallest one-time amount the scheme accepts.
- NFO
- A scheme's initial subscription window, before it starts trading.