Personal Finance Management

  Everyone would have read The Tortoise and the Hare story in their childhood days. The same is true for investments. The one whose behavior is that of the Hare seems to win in the short run but loses to the Tortoise in the long run. In investments, the Hare is the trader who wants to become rich quickly and the Tortoise is the long term investor. Let us see what is happening in the real world around us today. We are seeing a lot of online advertisements in you tube / facebook / twitter, who claim that they are making good money by trading in stocks. And they lure us to invest with them for some fee and profit share which they promise to deliver. Since, we do not know how this will work, most of us will start will a small amount. By the time we see some good returns over six to eight months period we get more confidence and will put more money into it. At the end of every month or quarter, they (Stock Portfolio Manager) take their share of fees and profit share. Everything is go...

  We keep hearing the news about people losing their life savings to fraudulent investment schemes. It is wondering about how again and again people are lured into believe in such fraudulent schemes and lose crores of rupees.   For many of them lessons learnt are too hard as they will never be able to recover from these setbacks during their life time. This is because of lack of personal finance management knowledge / skills, greed and herd mentality of following other without understanding the risks. While it is unfortunate that we are not taught about personal finance management in our school or colleges but it is also our mistake not to learn about it. After the college, we stop reading and learning about life skills and instead limit our focus to career & businesses. But if we want to excel in life, then we need to have multi disciplinary approach to life and learn variety of skills. There are few life skills one must learn (like personal money management, cooking ge...

  The Government of India launched an emergency helpline 1930 for reporting online frauds. Everyday thousands of complaints are reported about online frauds. The amounts involved in the cases may vary from few hundreds to Lakhs & in few cases it is in multiple crores. But in very few cases the lost money is recovered. In most of these cases the money is transferred via multiple fake bank accounts and goes to bank accounts which are located outside the country or it is converted into digital currencies and then transferred outside India. By the time the victim realizes he has been cheated, his money would have crossed the borders of India. In these cases, once the money crosses the border of India then it is difficult to get it back. To recollect one of such recent case is: Nebilo Technologies, a Crypto currency firm based out of Bangalore lost about Rs.380 crores in a cyber fraud case in June 2025. Just think about this for a minute. A company with deep understanding of cry...

  Today everyone needs to ask themselves this question seriously. Because in the last one decade we have seen drastic changes in the way we invest and spend our money. If you remember, before the demonetization we used to carry a lot of cash. We did not have UPI, no Phone Pay, no Google Pay etc. Most of the payments were made in cash. Only rich people used to carry credit cards for shopping, dining etc. Almost everyone used to go to banks, Post offices, stock market brokers, insurance offices for making fund transfers / investments. The risks of losing money in those days were different like pick-pocketing, robbers waiting near the ATMs and Banks or forgery of documents to steal from you. And we knew how to take precautions for these risks. Now we are living in a completely different era of Digital world. Most of the financial transactions, purchase, sales happen through mobile apps, laptops or through other electronic devices. This has helped both the businesses and customers ...