K S Manojkumar
Most Indian families remain clueless about how to grow their money. They usually put the biggest chunk of the blame on the system, their fate, and the circumstances in which they find themselves. With a deep self-pity, they lament how money keeps slipping through their fingers. They are waiting to hit the next jackpot never realising that the possibility of them getting struck by lightning in a lifetime is twice as high as them winning a lottery.
Are there ways in which we can improve the situation with our own efforts and abilities? What secret lies between the process of acquiring money, retaining it and then deploying it to earn surpluses?
Thankfully, financial planners have now begun to address this issue more methodically. The first thing financial planners or advisors bring out is the exaggerated relationship between being smart and being rich.
They discard and reject the theory outrightly. Prompted by studies by the growing breed of behavioural economists, who have lapped up Nobel prizes in the process of uncovering secrets of wealth creation, we now have a much clearer idea of what needs to be done.
So, we find the biggest geniuses that human society has ever produced like Issac Newton, to be complete failures in the process of harnessing the powers of the stock market, and ordinary 9 to 5 job holders, like one Ronald James Read, leave the world with a net worth of over tens of millions.
Luckily, nothing of what financial planners have to say has anything to do with analysing charts, doing technical analysis, reading bulky financial reports, or sitting all day in front of financial news television channels.
Let us, in the coming articles, have a look into this journey from making incremental savings, to building an emergency fund to turning it into an investment corpus that will help us live through a long retired life that medical science has bestowed on us.