Not from finance background and don’t know how and where to manage, save or invest your money?

Finding the right way to start learning about managing your money and taking control?

Don’t want to hire an agent to manage your money on your behalf and take away that precious commission from you?

If you are looking for answers to any of the above questions, then you are at the right place.

But why should you believe my advice? Well, because as I say:

It’s best to learn from those who learnt by implementation and not by plain theory.

I don’t advocate myself to be someone with decades of experience in this field but because I have gone through the transition from student life (teens) to corporate life (20s), I believe my knowledge & experience might be useful for you.

Alright, so, let’s get started. Shall we?

What is Personal Finance?

In simple terms, personal finance is the know-how of managing your hard-earned money.

Saving>>Investing>>Spending

One should start saving and investing first and then spend from the leftover of their income.

Why do you need to manage your finances on your own?

Well, because of the following reasons:

• You don’t want to hire agents to manage your hard-earned money and you have 0 to minimal control on where your money is being invested.
• You don’t want the agents to take that 1-2% extra commission from your returns because believe it or not, that 1-2% will become a massive corpus that you let go of.
• You don’t want to trust others with your money.
• You are genuinely interested in learning about personal finance.
• You want to reap the benefits of market volatility and the highs and lows of the stock market.
• You want to manage your asset allocation as and when you want to.

I think, now, I’ve given you enough reasons to start thinking about managing your finances on your own.

Why is personal finance not talked about enough then?

Well, because of these primary reasons:

• A lot of people still consider stock market as betting. But, lemme tell you, personal finance is a much broader term and stock market is just one aspect of it.
• Our education system does not even consider including ‘Personal Finance’ as a topic of importance. The current system wants us to earn more money but does not tell us how to multiply it.
• Our parent’s generation has seen a lot of huge financial scams in the stock market in their 20s while it was still majorly unregulated (before S.E.B.I. had enough powers). Example: Harshad Mehta’s Scam 1992.
• Our parent’s generation did not have easy access to information and knowledge regarding personal finance.
• It wasn’t so easy for our parent’s generation to start their investment journey as all the investment platforms like ETMoney, Groww, Zerodha, WazirX, etc which have brought investments to our fingertips, are a gift from the internet revolution.

In the upcoming blogs in ‘Personal Finance’ series, I’ll debunk a lot of these myths and will write about the various techniques and instruments which will be most useful for someone in their teens or 20s.

Stay tuned for a lot of blogs on the following in ‘Personal Finance’ series:

• Emergency fund
• Health (medical) Insurance & Term (life) Insurance
• Stocks, Mutual Funds, Smallcase
• Debunking myths around Stock Market
• Investing Vs Trading
• Compounding: The 8th Wonder of the World
• Debt instruments
• Commodity investments (Example: Gold)
• Cryptocurrency investments
• Retirement planning
• Tax-saving instruments
• Self-learning resources