Now when it comes to instruments that can help you achieve early retirement, mutual funds are right at the top. However, please be mindful that the risk and return will vary according to how fast you want to grow your corpus and your portfolio mix. Since you are starting young and have 20 years till you retire, your ideal portfolio mix would be debt + equity portfolio with equity percentage higher. As you near your investment horizon, you will need to keep rebalancing your portfolio by increasing the debt amount and decreasing equity. So for instance for the few first years, you may have 80% equity and 20% debt, which will ensure the high growth of your investments. Towards the end, this percentage should get reversed to 20% equity and 80% debt. This will sure your risk is minimized by the time you choose to redeem your funds after reaching the desired retirement corpus.