Investment woes- Reliance Life Insurance

I want to express my dismay, anguish, frustration at what has happened to my investments with very popular and heavily subscribed companies. Their names are enough to start a rush amongst the investor crowd.Sadly it is the salaried class which gets sucked in by the glib talking sales people employed by these companies.The sales person  told me Reliance, Fidelity and ICICI Prudential and I said yes to all. I had invested in ULIP, Mutual fund and Pension plan.
I invested 60000 over a three year lock in period. 20000 every January for three years. Till about a year back I was confident that this investment would grow ten fold. 3-6 lakhs in three years. That is the picture painted by the sales person in Jan 08.
Today I am a wiser person thanks to the advice given by a friend who has been guiding me for about a year now.I was sharing my rather thin investment folio with him and he said the moment your three year lock in period is over , redeem your money invested in mutual funds, pension schemes and ULIPs and invest it in the equity market.He made me open a de-mat account six months back and asked me to invest up to 15000 every month in shares recommended by him.

Well, coming back to the Reliance story.

Investment woes

I had a great learning experience recently, in fact less than a week ago. I learnt that I am financially still very uneducated. I can live with that but what is bitter and unpalatable is the fact that the financial world where we invest our savings to reduce the tax burden and hope for a sizable growth in income, would prefer us to stay that way.
The year was 2008 and it was the beginning of the year and I was on the look out for a lucrative ELSS option where I could park my 1.0 lacs and avoid taxation on that amount.

The rest was easy. Very prudently I was advised to diversify my investment into more than two investments and what better than Mutual funds and ULIPs, I was told.