Who is old? And why does it matter so much

Ask a 20-year-old who is old and she is likely to say anybody over 40. At 30 you are likely to shift that to maybe 50. At 40, 60 is old. Our perception of who is old keeps moving as we age. Not long ago, an 82-year-old very seriously spoke to me about “that young man of 50”. But it is true that the answer to “who is old” has changed from what it was a hundred years ago. That’s because, the “who is old” question needs to be seen in the context of life expectancy, or the age at which an average person dies. World Bank data puts this number at 52.5 for the world in 1960 and at 71.8 in 2015. The generation that will live to be a 100 may have possibly already been born.

The answer of “who is old” matters in ways that have nothing to do with vanity. It matters to each of us and it matters to a world that is living longer and longer.

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A year on, RERA is still under construction

It is difficult to run into somebody in Delhi you know and not have them confess that they too are caught with their money stuck in stalled real estate projects in the suburbs of Noida and Gurugram. The bankruptcy process in the Jaypee Infratech Ltd case got the headlines, but the number of large developers in jail is not small. It includes companies such as Unitech, SRS Group and DB Reality, showing how deep the rot in real estate goes because rich people in India seldom go to jail for breaking the law.

Stuck in the still-to-be-Italian-marbled buildings are the savings of the urban mass affluent Indian who thought she was investing smartly in the property boom. Investors bought into the good deals offered by builders who offered to pay their first few EMIs (equated monthly instalments), who offered post dated cheques for those EMIs, who offered a free car if you booked a flat above a certain value. Real estate investors who bit the bait allowed themselves to believe deals too good to be true, to be true. They refused to listen to sane counsel of friends and newspaper articles that warned them against such deals.

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Which money mistake grade are you at?

It is a brand new financial year and some of you must be gearing up to do things differently this year. But before you begin looking for the next best investment or the next flavour of the year, spend some time thinking about the money mistakes you make. I find that money mistakes come in many grades that move from the very basic to the more sophisticated. I’ll talk about just three right now. Grade one money mistakes are entry level errors, grade two money mistakes are made by more sophisticated investors, and so on. For all the attention that ‘getting rich’ or ‘investing to win’ kind of titles get in the book space, I think they are jumping the gun. Most of us struggle with far more basic issues than making that one winning investment and working towards a jackpot. Identify the grade you’re at in the money mistakes matrix.

Grade 1 Money Mistakes

A very basic error, it is the ground floor of money mistakes. It is to say: I don’t have money to invest. I am too poor. I have no savings. Where is the money? I have no head for numbers. Too difficult for me. No time. Will do it soon. Will hand over money to my spouse, father, brother, good friend who will manage for me. I’m too young to worry. Now I’m too old, what’s the point. These are all loser statements. Don’t make them. I’ve run workshops on money that have had village level NGO workers earning a tiny salary to the mass affluent in big metros. They all had the same look: why am I in the room, I have no money to invest? If the peanut seller outside your office can save some money, so can you. Not having a surplus is easily fixed— you can earn more, spend less and rework your current borrowing and investing patterns. There is no other magic formula to starting a saving surplus in your monthly income rhythm. 1st graders can be identified by their don’t care attitude towards money, which actually hides many insecurities and fears.

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