Hi All,
A Warm Welcome to all of you.. I have started gathering information regarding Personal Finance and I have tried few of them. It seems working for me. I thought I would share it across with my fellow comrades so that it is helpful for them and for me as well.. Why it is helpful for me?? Good question 🙂 In this way I can read loads of articles and write up and improve my writing skills and also increase my Personal Finance knowledge.
There are so many topics that I can blog about, but why I prefer blogging about Personal Finance is, it is one of the topics which is relatively new to many of us and being Indian it is really very hard to learn about money from the family and good friends.
Our culture is such that we youngsters live with our parents and major of our financial decisions are taken by our parents for our own good and we blindly believe it and move forward with the decision. Most of us wont even dare to question our parents and we don’t even think that there might be any issues with their decision. This is all because of our culture. We are always bought up in such a environment and it wont change for quite some time. If something like that has to happen then Money related matters should be discussed during dinner. Its really nice when all the family members discuss together and make a financial decision rather than only parents making the decision and we being mute observers. I was pondering over this issue for some time now, then I realized the few things. Most of the youngsters are not interested in money matters and they are very happy if their parents take care of it. They don’t bother about it till they have to, then they don’t know what to do when they are forced to make the decisions and they start screwing up later when they were supposed to know things. Youngsters are so much scared to play with their money. They are afraid of making mistakes. This is how most of the Indian Youngsters are. Most of them don’t manage their own money. It is always someone else who is doing it for them.
Being youngsters we are provided with the opportunity to make financial decisions and if it goes wrong we can always correct them, it wont cost us dearly. We have to move forward with it and learn from them. Experience is always good even if we make a blunder as it always teaches something that is useful for us. If you are afraid of making mistakes then it just clearly means you are not trying anything new, if we try anything new we are bound to make mistakes. This should not stop us from trying new things. A good learner is a person who does not repeat the same mistake twice.
Personal Finance is Essential
There are loads of books based on Personal Finance in western countries and not in India. This clearly indicates that there is not much importance given to it in India.
Personally, I don’t find anything that is as interesting as Personal Finance blogs and books. It teaches you how to manage your hard earned money and not by giving it to others to manage the same. Money is considered to be THE EVIL THING and hence not many people try to think about it. I love the art of managing money. Why I prefer to say art is because it provides you an opportunity to be creative and imaginative. You can question how managing money can be creative? Just for example, think you are given Rs.100 and asked to increase this amount by 10% within a span of one month. How can you do it? The simplest way is to give it to someone who is in need and ask him to pay back with 10% interest. One other way would be, buy some vegetables for Rs. 100 and sell them at 10% profit. The list goes on..
Most people know how to earn money and spend money and not manage money. In this blog I would like to share few insights with which you can actually manage money. I can understand the plight of Software Engineer’s life. Most of them earn fat pay checks and spend lavishly only to realize that at the end of the day they live a life of paycheck to paycheck. This is a very disturbing situation. In almost 2 years of my experience I have lived the same way. I wanted to make a change and I am making it. I have started realizing how to go about doing it and instead of living from paycheck to paycheck I want to have financial freedom i.e. my income must be much more than my expenditure. I always believe in Increasing the Income rather than decreasing the expenditure to achieve financial independence. But I have realized that Increasing the income is not as easy as I thought. Not many have that zeal to do things and increase the income. It takes extra bit from you than what you are. You just cant assume that things will be done. It needs to be done. But instead of increasing the income, we can decrease the expenditure and then manage money to achieve financial independence.
I would like to share various posts from now on which will be very random in thoughts. Please feel free to share your thoughts. I would love to read your thoughts just to make sure that I have put across my thoughts clearly.
Warm Regards,
Saravanan
Engineer's Finance 