Take small steps. But make a start!

We recognize the fact that many of you are too busy throughout the year in your economic activities intended to make a living. But if you show the same dedication in your personal finance exercise, the same will enable you to save more and fulfill all your dreams in life. When we ask people to take action in their financial life, they simply delay doing so because they want get big results and big change to take place in their financial life. Remember that bigger is not always better; bigger is just bigger. They don’t want to begin with small actions. They believe that they will take action at one go. This leads to procrastination and that time would never come for them to take action in their financial life.

But still, most of the people who make promises to take actions but forget them within a short spell of time and break them very easily. For instance, they promise: “I will lose my weight by 25 kgs in a year” or “I will quit smoking in next 3 months” or “I will save Rs 2 crores for retirement”, and so on. These are all wonderful promises and very inspiring and they have to make these promises for them to move forward in life. These intentions just evaporate or at best, they start working towards those promises but then, in between, they abandon the same by whatever reasons.

Let us see why this happens and how we can make the situation better by changing the way we look at them.

Take small actions

There is an old Chinese proverb; “It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.”  This in our opinion applies even to your “personal life as well as personal finance” exercise.

Here are some instances of how big action can be broken down into small actions:

As outlined that “I will lose my weight by 25 kgs in a year”. It can easily be achieved by walk for 20 minutes per day, eat 1 less pizza per month, exercise on Wednesday and Saturday for 1 hour. Similarly, for quitting smoking in 3 months, have 1 less cigarette each day for next 15 days and thereafter keep reducing 1 every 15 days.

The same holds true for our personal finance as well: A Real Case Story

One of my friends has a goal coming up after 20 years-he wants to a have a substantial corpus of funds to spend on his child’s education. To achieve this goal, he had to invest Rs 2,000 per month by way of SIP for the next 20 years. Setting asides a sum of  Rs 2,000 per month may look easy enough, but at the end of the month, after all his bills were paid, he was already running low on funds and that Rs 2,000 felt like a big chunk of money.

Now, he managed to cancel his SIP for a month or two and then he began to lose focus. It started to look unachievable. So, he postponed his existing SIP till the next increment of his salary. Then, his wife intervened; as she made sure that she extracted Rs 100 each day from him and put it in a piggy bank. By the end of the month, she comfortably had a sum of Rs 3,000 to invest instead of Rs 2,000; all because it was easier to save Rs 100 per day than Rs 2,000 per month.

This is an example of a taking small action in your personal finance.

Personal Finance exercise

Start giving your personal finance exercise half an hour of attention each week. Make small promises to yourself and complete what you set out to do as you can address some neglected things in the two hours that you have allocated to the task each month. If you take time to plan your day, you make it more meaningful and productive, just like as you give time to your relationships, they get better. The same formula applies to your personal finance. It needs your time; it needs your attention. Set aside just 1 hour this coming Sunday, after lunch, to have look at your financial life… and see if you are on the right track or not. Keep your financial life creative and simple. Think of what needs to be done to your personal finances and do it, little by little.

Conclusion  

Remember, it is vital for you to step-by-step ascertain where you stand, in terms of your Income and existing investments, so that you effectively undertake your personal finance exercise which in turn would deliver you the objective of long term wealth creation along with capital protection.

In the past if you have taken your financial planning decisions at the eleventh hour, never mind as “Better late as never”. But, please learn from them and don’t repeat the same mistakes again. Adopt the prudent steps while doing your financial planning.