Planning Financial Health

In one of my previous blogs on productivity Being Planned, I have talked about my thoughts on documenting my plans so that I keep taking small yet important strides towards achieving them. In another productivity blog Boosted Productivity, I have covered what matters to me in the long run and a big part of those is financial health. Hence sharing my strides on one of the key focus areas which are how I plan my financial health.

After reaching a near-zero bank balance after my masters, costly hospitalization and my failed startup, I have been successfully saving since 2018 actively and till now my savings include some stocks on NSE India that I bought via ICICI direct, got vested stocks for Facebook, invested in building my second home for rental income, Sovereign Gold Bonds, National Pension Scheme India, Savings cum insurance schemes, Public Provident Funds, Mutual Funds, etc. I have realized that I slack a lot when it comes to tracking my finances and it has become a problem now to understand where to put more money. Of course, having an accountant to help me do my finances is one way to go about it, but I prefer personally tracking everything because of two main reasons:

• One needs to learn to manage their finances
• Cannot have the luxury of another person to do my finances every time
• Independence in making economic decisions is very encouraging and relieving

Firstly, I have moved super fast to address potential reasons which had dented my financial pocket in past. I got my health insurance and medical insurance. I keep some cash reserve to fuel my life for atleast 6-months and I stay away from doing any adventurous move like switching to a new startup role. I would rather stick with Facebook as of now and prepare the ground for my solid wealth before performing any stunts. When I was hospitalized, I was super worried about my parents who would be rendered helpless in my absence because they would not be able to track my investments since they are so spread across.

I have always wondered about the best way to personally save and track (and share in case of any unfateful eventuality) all my investments which seem to be spread across a plethora of channels. I ultimately stumbled on a Google Drive solution to securely save all the information about my bank accounts, investments so that it is accessible from anywhere and is resilient to device/data/human loss. It seems to work great for me and I was happy to have organized all the information in a decent intelligible structure. This also brought me a situation where I faced an information overload when I had to make a call to invest my salary savings and choose which channel is the best. So, I built a google spreadsheet to help me decide exactly that! More on that in my next blog. I use this sheet to spread my investments mainly in NSE India for earning more dividend and for understanding price appreciation of stocks.

I have a few things left to do like going to my native village and do legal mutation/registration of parental property but those things are time-taking and are currently being very well managed by my father. I will certainly have my next plans after I sort out all my finances. I understand that the value of the property may be much more than I can ever build on my own because of rapid urbanization and price appreciation back in my hometown in India.

Another north star goal is to register a company in India since company tax is way lower than individual income tax. I feel adding more people towards my mission and goals would place me higher in positions of power.