Personal finance is great, it’s addictive, and it’s one of the best decisions one would make in their life. It will make you scratch your head, but you will enjoy it, and that is the best part.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Most of us have grown up watching how important the role of money is and how important a ‘handsome pay’ is. Be it a comfortable life or status in society, having money makes it easier (taking into consideration the only hard-earned money — the one that you legally deserve to have). Unfortunately, from what I have learned in my 20 years of education, managing the money doesn’t even make it to the list, and this just messes up the finances of most people because consumerism is as sure as eggs are eggs but superintending the money that you earn and generating wealth still seem to be a characteristic in short supply.
This thought struck me when I paid income tax for the first time in my life, and last I checked, most of my friends and acquaintances were as clueless (and still are) as I was back then. Panicked, I resorted to my parents’ suggestions, who have been dealing with income taxes for almost 40 years. All I got was passe ideas of fixed deposits, post office savings, and some more things on the same lines. They were not all bad and surely helped me, but now it was more than just the taxes. Why? Let’s understand…
Most of the Indian middle class is glued to a highly archaic idea of investing, and I am not ready to accept it. The classic saving instruments do work and should never be looked down upon, but your money needs more space, and there is a fair number of safe, secure, and better places to put it in. What I realized after having a look at my parents’ way of personal finance management was the fact that it was not really management — it was plain, simple, and vanilla savings. Just that!
Now I was more than convinced to move up the ladder and break my family’s stereotypical and vanilla saving plans. I know it sounds a bit overdramatic, but that’s just how the picture in my mind is. Honestly, even after working for 40 years, my parents’ have failed to create the wealth that they easily could have, had they learned the art of personal finance management.
Moving up this ladder starts from managing the taxes to learning to invest and finally to learning to create wealth while remaining as little in debt as I can.
This realization is just the beginning of a whole new crisis; the crisis of actually learning to invest and religiously pursuing it. With over 1000 videos on YouTube from over 1000 creators, resources for learning the same are definitely not scarce, and it’s just shocking to see how few people appreciate content that is massively helpful and much more relevant than lots of nugatory and substandard content gathering millions of views.
To cut short, this crisis lasts for a while. It takes watching and reading over hundreds of quality content on personal finance and months of coming up with a final plan for yourself.
As the title suggests, it’s a curious case, and I am no expert in personal finance but just a curious person myself. And as some great mind once said, “the future belongs to the curious,” I have decided to remain curious about my money, my wealth, and my finances for all my life. After doing a lot of research and putting in a lot of my brains, I did my first investments, and the returns were better than what I expected. I keep learning and making the appropriate changes in my portfolio, and I remain as updated about the market and economy as I can.
Personal finance is great, it’s addictive, and it’s one of the best decisions one would make in their life. It will make you scratch your head, but you will enjoy it, and that is the best part. It will make you quit on frivolous expenses, and it will enlighten you. Most of all, if done wisely and at the right time, it can be a solution to several problems that you have or may have in the future.
So, break the wheel, climb up the ladder and start learning. Be curious about your own money, be curious about investing, and make something good come out of this curiosity.
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