How much do you want to earn ? What kind of Financial life do you want ?

Don’t we claim to lot of people that Money is not important to us in life ? We want happiness, We want time to do things which we “like”. We are interested in health , happiness and peace of mind, We want to spend time with our family, play with kids, take our spouse for a world tour and a lot of similar things.

Average person thinking

Most of the people will claim that money is not the biggest thing in there life , but still we see most of the people working consistently for 50-60 hrs a week , some work 70 hrs+ . We are free only on weekends and that too goes in household chores and planning for next week and may be one evening which one can claim to be the way “they wanted it to be” .

The truth is most the people can achieve there financial goals but are not fully committed towards it . This may be true because of lack of knowledge or attitude towards this .

We all have desire to achieve our goals in life , and that will happen only when we are financially independent , No wonder that we will have to work in the starting period of our lives . Every will have to do that , but better financial management can help in achieving your goals earlier than average .

So take out some time to work on your personal finance , thats what you are working for whole your life !! , incase you dont know 🙂

People Invest and then forget

Most of the people invest or take decisions and then forget about it , they feel that there job is done . this may be because of the fear of loosing money or coming to know that they made a wrong decision .

How many times it happened that you took a share , mutual fund or a policy and it didn’t work for you , didn’t give you returns as expected and actually made losses . Did you care to find the reason for making a mistake , did you take any step to confront the situation and take measures to fix the mess . Or you just left it to destiny saying “I will just give it some time , it should be fine in 1 yr or so”

Successful people take hard decisions , they work for there money , they read , they go to websites to find out things , they take out time to contact people and get information about it .

My experience

I took a Term Insurance from SBI (SBI Shield Plan) last year . It was the best plan which suited me .After some months there was news that term insurance premiums have come down and there is a new entrant “Aegon Religare ” in the market . I calculated back and saw that Reliage premium was Rs 1,000 cheaper than SBI (for my policy) .

I contacted my Agent and asked him to provide me the numbers (premium) for this year and told him straight forward that I will surrender the policy this year I I dont get a good deal . Atleast I will not choose them for my additional Insurance cover .

I don’t think many people care to find this out and take the “pain” of doing it all over again for the sake of small money . remember that its not small money … Small is Big !!

People make fortunes by investing regularly small chuck of money . So if get a chance to save even a small bit , do it . It will show in future .

What to do ?

Money can be generated but with discipline , you have to understand this and act on this . Invest systematically for a long period of time and use well know principles of Asset Allocation and Portfolio Rebalancing (read what is it) , portfolio rebalancing .

Just like we have lots of data , confusion and noise in Stock market , in the same way we also have it in personal finance . There are thousands of products claiming to be better than others . There are mutual funds who claim to give 25% consistently (there are many which have actually given) .

You have to get out of the noise , and understand that you dont need much to make long term wealth . You just need better than average returns .

Let us see some components required :

– Strong Planning

– Stick to the plan and follow it with Discipline

– you dont need 20% or 30% returns (and don’t even look for it) . Just 5-6% above inflation is good and that’s what you should expect .

So plan your finances well in advance , have a path to follow and then just follow it without deviating in between . Dont get greedy .

Please let me know how do you like this new look for the blog , I am sure many like it , It gives better look and feel .

Answer me following question

– Do you have any financial plan for future ?
– What kind of returns do you expect from your investments as per your thinking ?