The Association of International Wealth Management of India (AIWMI), a not-for-profit organisation and a globally recognised membership association for finance professionals, released its inaugural annual edition of India’s Best Finance Teachers on the occasion of Teachers’ Day which is celebrated on 5th September every year. This power list is an ode to all those wonderful finance teachers who continue to shape the present and the future finance professionals of our country….The list consists of some prominent names such as Monika Halan – Writer, Author & Speaker.
Insurance has been the buzz word ever since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the special show ‘Smart Money’, CNBC-TV18’s Sonia Shenoy spoke to Sumit Rai, MD and CEO at Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance, and Monika Halan, Author of Let’s Talk Money, to understand what is the protection cover that one must have for one’s family. They also shared some hacks to buy life or health insurance.
In my book Let’s Talk Money, the chapter on Life Insurance asks you to do this exercise to figure out what the family’s life looks like after you are gone. Shut your eyes and imagine you are gone. And then see the family’s distress in trying to piece your financial life together. You can’t message them from the other side or whisper passwords in their ear as they try and open your mobile and email to access crucial money details.
Each of us who manages the family finances has a duty of care towards those who either depend on our money or on our ability to manage the household finances and investments. The duty of care towards the family extends to after we are gone and we need to leave an ‘If-I-Die-Before-You’ file.
Digital or physical?
The first decision is about whether you want to maintain this file online or in a physical form. The problem with online content is that its location and access might not be that easy in case the passwords are not known by the family. Also, digital content is vulnerable to hard disk crashes, hacking and getting erased by error. A physical location in a notebook, file or register is easier to locate but is open to falling in the wrong hands.
This is a personal call that you make, but if you are not very easy with using services like a cloud or have trouble finding files in your computer and forget your passwords often, it is best to maintain this record in a physical form. You will need to be vigilant and keep it safe and also ensure that the immediate family knows about the content and the location of this file. Some people buy a note book or register, others prefer to use a ring file folder in which sheets can be added by opening the metal ring to thread fresh pages in. Remember that information in the file is dynamic and will keep changing. A hard format will reduce your ability to change the information like changes in service providers, account numbers, passwords and gadgets.
There are some basics that you need to put into this file, but other than that you can keep adding whatever you think is needed.
Will and ID cards.
The location of the Will must be documented. Some people keep a copy of the Will in the locker and one copy with the financial planner or lawyer. Put down the name of the executor of the Will along with his or her phone number and email. If you still have not made your Will. Do so now. I cannot stress the importance of this step enough. Read this piece for more on why you need a Will. Your PAN, Aadhaar, driver’s license and voter card number and date of expiry must be put down. Also tell your surviving family where you keep these documents.
Important People.
Put down the names, email and phone number of the people who you know will help the family when you are gone. A financial planner, CA, lawyer are the people who need to be there. Choose a friend who you know will help the family and put her or his name down as well. Go back to the first piece I wrote on this to get a detailed list of people to contact here.
Banks.
The names and basic details of all your bank accounts and lockers need to be documented here. The name of the bank, branch, account number, IFSC code, name of nominee (this presupposed that your bank account has a nominee), locker number are basic details. Next put down your digital banking username and password. Most banks also have a set of three questions you need to answer periodically. For example: name of your first pet or city of birth. Put down the questions and answers too. Keep a page for each bank since some details will change. Bank passwords change and you will need enough room below the password to strike out the old for the new. It is a good idea to put a date on the new password. That also reminds you to change in every six months or so. Put down the location of the cheque books, passbooks if any, locker keys as well.
Credit and debit cards.
Write details like the bank that issued the card, what kind of card it is (Mastercard, Rupay or Visa), card number, pin, date of expiry and the phone number linked to the card. India has a two layer level of protection on our card use where after entering the PIN, we also get an OTP to complete the transaction. Therefore access to your mobile phone will be a very important part of handing over control to the family. See the section on ‘Digital’ for that.
Tax details.
Document your username and password for the e-filing site. Also put down the location of the physical tax files in your home or office. Your CA’s name is already there in the important people list. No harm in remembering to check if you have put it down already or not.
Digital wallets and UPI.
Think of usernames and passwords of digital wallets like PayTM and of access details to your UPI account, either through BHIM or other apps that run on UPI such as Google Pay or Whatsapp.
Investments.
This will have details of your broker account, NSDL account, the platform you use to invest into stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Usernames and passwords along with details of each account. Here is a list of the various kinds of assets an average family has. Put down the location of the papers and files that go with each account.
Real estate.
You need to document all the properties you have. The location of the papers and loans if any. Document if any of these are on rent, where the rent agreement is located and how much rent comes each month.
Insurance.
Life, health, vehicle and home covers are the most often used insurance covers. You need to put down details of each policy. Then name of the policy is important. People often say to me: I have XYZ policy. Now XYZ is the name of the company that has at least 25-30 products. You need to put down the name of the company, the name of your policy, the number of your policy, the premium you pay each year on what date, what is the date of the policy maturity and if you know, what the policy pays out. Document the name of the beneficiary of the policy. Putting down the name and contact details of the person who sold you the policy is also a good idea. Write the location of the policy documents.
Loans.
An average household has a home loan, a car loan and sometimes a personal loan. Put down the details of how much was taken, when for what interest and what is the EMI you are paying and when this gets over. If there is a relationship manager who is attached toy our loan, document his or her contact details here. Again this information will keep changing, so keep one sheet per loan.
Digital.
Read this piece here to get a list of all the different digital footprints we leave and how the family can access some of it. The details of accessing your computers, tablets, phones, email accounts, social media accounts, apps such as digi-locker need to be shared. Again one page per gadget or service provider. Remember that your phone is one of the most important parts of the financial reconstruction for the family. Smart phones have pins, patterns, facial recognition and fingerprint locks. Whatever you choose, remember to put two locks, so that if your finger or face is not around, the family can use the pin or pattern to unlock. Some people actually put the spouse’s finger print as the alternate print that unlocks the phone. Just as an aside – no your dead finger or face will not work on the phone. Morbid, but true. Telecom service providers too need to have a nominee feature now that the phone is such an important device in the financial life of a person.
Utilities
This will have details of all your utility service providers such as water, electricity, gas, wifi, phone and whatever else you are using. Most of these will also have a digital interface with usernames and passwords. Keep a sheet for each relationship. You might even want to put down the location of the physical bills here.
Passwords.
Our passwords have become the crucial link to opening digital locks to much of our money life. Different people use different ways to remember their passwords. You need to have a password protocol in place for you and your spouse. Some logic that you use to design PINs and passwords so that even if the password was changed before you could document it, the spouse might be able to figure it out.
Update the file. This is a habit that you will need to work on because the work is not done when you create the file, it is continuous. Each time something changes you need to update the file. Most often it will be passwords. Less often it will be a financial service provider. Whatever the change, it needs to be recorded in the file.
Instructions.
You might even want to leave instructions on how to invest the money from the life insurance proceeds and warnings of what not to do. Read this for more ideas on what the family will do in the first six months after you have passed.
Keep this information safe. This digital or physical data is really the key to your entire money life. So have your security protocols in place and the spouse needs to know how to find this digital or physical file.
When you begin creating this file it might feel like a sombre process – it is never easy to contemplate your own death. But once you do it for a while and get more comfortable with your own mortality, the process becomes easier and the unintended consequence is that you begin to value close relationships even more. Each time you look at that file it is a reminder on the fragility of life and the good fortune that you still have it. Some people I know even put in cutesy messages in that file so that when it is finally accessed, the family will get a smile in a hard time on their faces!
Even though we believe that we will not be able to live without a loved one, the physical body has a routine that will prevail. The running of the house too has a rhythm that will ask to be maintained. And in dealing with the demands of the body, the family, the work and the home gives us the external push to limp back to some sort of order. If the principal income earner has passed away, we will need a lot of work to get the financial life in order. Here are six steps towards a financial recovery. Small alert: this is not going to be an easy exercise and you will need to mentally prepare yourself for some hard work and decisions.
1. No hasty decisions. The months immediately after are the most emotionally charged ones and it is best to keep the cold money decisions away from the surge of emotions that well up. I have known people walk away from family assets in a fit of emotion. Others might want to relocate at once and make hasty real estate decisions. Yet others rush into investing the insurance money chased as they are by their banks. Do not allow your bank to suggest products from your insurance money proceeds. In the first six months after the passing of a spouse (I will use the word spouse here, but replace it with an appropriate relation depending on your situation), do not take any big financial decisions. Park them for a time when you have a better grip on the ground reality, when all the paperwork is done, when all the assets and liabilities are in place and when you know how much you need and what you have. Six months later you might be in a better place emotionally to take a more rational decision.
2. Cash flow audit. If the first step is to not do anything, the second one is to understand the rhythm of money in and out of the house. You need to understand the monthly, quarterly, annual inflows and outflows of money. For salaried people it is relatively easy to check the monthly credit into the bank, for business owners the mapping will be a bit more complicated. Next, itemise the regular monthly spends. You will need an excel sheet or a notebook to put down the regular recurring expenses each month. The bank and credit card statements will be a good starting point for this exercise. You can reach out for help with this here and here.
3. The spending audit. From the cash flow audit you have now got the main items of expenditure. From this we need to put down the must-do ones. EMI, rent, utilities, school fees, domestic help salaries, groceries, premiums into health, home and vehicle covers are spends that you will need to continue. Stop all investments that have no cost of a mid-way exit such as a mutual fund. You might even be able to pause some investment-oriented insurance policies if you speak with the company. Till you get an audit of the income you can draw from your assets, curtail discretionary spends as much as you can.
4. The asset audit. See this article to understand what the asset pile can look like and find what you own now and what is it worth. If there was a life insurance policy whose money will get paid to you, it is best to park it in a six month deposit before you decide on how it is to be invested. Include proceeds from the provident fund account, the gratuity if any, PPF, mutual funds, stocks. If there are more than one real estate assets, consider (but do not decide just yet) if you want to rent it or will be better off selling and investing the money for a regular income. Count the money in the other assets so that you can put a number down. The goal is to see how much the total pool of money is so that we can work on drawing rent, interest, dividend or profit from it. The income from your assets will have to replace the income of the deceased.
5. The liability audit. You might find that the asset you thought was yours actually belongs to the bank. This could be a house or a car. Add up all the loans value and check if there was an insurance against that loan. If there was, then the insurance will pay the remaining loan left leaving the asset in your possession. If not, you will have to decide if you have the money to keep paying the EMI – for example, if you plan to go to work to replace at least a part of the income, then you could keep the loan. But in most cases, it is best to be loan free and pre-pay loans if you can.
6. Big decisions. After the grunge work of figuring out your financial situation, now you can take important decisions about your future. Decisions such as relocating to a cheaper city, or with parents or siblings might be needed if there are few assets and debts are large. You might plan to go to work, or a young adult in the house could need to forego the higher education plans and get a job quickly. You may need to sell some assets such as jewellery, vehicles, additional real estate holdings so that there is money to put into income generating assets such as FDs, bonds and mutual funds. These decisions will depend on how much the total net worth number looks like and how you are able to deploy it to meet your costs over the rest of your life. These costs will only rise due to inflation, so ideally the asset pool must be so large that it can support an increasing spend over your lifetime.
Ideally use the services of a financial planner to rebuild your financial life. And you put down detailed notes for others to follow as you figure out your financial life, so that the cycle of unknowing does not repeat.
Next up. How to make the If-I-Die-Before-You file.
This is a series to help reconstruct the financial life of a person who is no more. While death never came with just old age, but the Wuhan virus has brought the fragility of life right into our homes. In this piece, I discussed the seven important people to contact as the first step of rebuilding the money life of a person who is not there to tell you what is where.
The next step is to use the deceased person’s digital exhaust to trace out some important details of their finances. Our digital footprint reveals a lot about who we are and what we do. Big tech platforms use this to direct advertising at us. You too can use the footprints to find some missing pieces of the money jigsaw you are trying to make.
Phone. One of the key devices to help you trace out the money profile of a person. Your first gate to unlock will be the phone password that locks the device. I am hoping that the password is something you either already know or can guess given the set of passwords a family tends to use. We all have a certain method in using passwords and plenty of couples share the mobile pins with each other. If the phone has a face or fingerprint lock, you will need some techie help to unlock the phone. There are resources on the web that deal with this, but are specific to the kind of phone, the version and the associated platforms used. So, yes, there might be a way to unlock, but no, I won’t go into it. You will need to get some techie in the extended family or friends to help with this.
What are we looking for? We are looking for phone numbers of the people mentioned in the earlier story on who to contact. Look in the ‘recently called’ list. Take an hour’s time and then search through the entire phone list and forward to yourself numbers that have anything to do with finances. Most people save numbers with the function or the contact details will have the name of the firm the person works for or runs. We are also looking into the photos and specifically for pictures of documents that the person might have saved. Some people save images of their important documents like PAN, Aadhar, passport, driving license and such like on their phones. You might even find images or PDFs of insurance policies, mutual fund account statements, bank account statements and other such documents on the phone itself. The deceased might be using an app to manage the budget and that too will give plenty of clues as to the regular outflows. You might see the premium for an insurance policy that you did not know about. You might see systematic investment plan (SIP) outflows on a monthly basis.
Computer. A desktop and or laptop is also an extremely useful device to unpack since it is a significant storehouse of the deceased person’s digital footprints. Again, I am hoping that the passwords are shared with you and you can access the computer. If not, get some techie or use google to figure out how to open a locked computer. Assuming that you are able to open the device, you are looking for documents scanned and stored. Documents such as PAN, Aadhar and other identifiers. Downloaded insurance policies – most car, home and life insurance policies are now sent in a digital form as well – are usually stored in the hard disk of the computer. Look for a folder with tax details. Another one might have bank details. There could be NSDL (depository) monthly statements on shares and mutual funds held. Property papers might have been scanned and stored. Some net worth and asset lists might be maintained. There may be an excel sheet or a word file with a list of regular payments that are due, such as rent, EMI, premiums, SIPs. Speak to the office assistant or boss for help with an office computer.
Tablets. Most people today have a multiple set of devices. Look for a tablet such as an Ipad or an android tablet. If the person preferred to use the tablet more than the laptop or desk top, you might find the details stored in this device.
Email. Unlocking the emails is another way to access the financial details of the person. Even if you cannot access the phone or computer, you can try and open the email if you know the password. The combination of a one-time password (OTP) along with an email address registered with service providers will give you access to most accounts.
Whatsapp (or Signal or Telegram – some messaging app) messages. Assuming that you have been able to unlock some device, now go through the messages. The messages to a financial service provider will give clues to what bank accounts, what assets and what liabilities the person had. Some people message themselves important updates and details on whatsapp instead of using the ‘notes’ features on phones and laptops.
Digi-locker. Few people will be using this cool new app (https://digilocker.gov.in) that aims to store all your original documents in one place. This is a government portal and app and some people are already using it to store documents. Again some combination of OTP plus email will be needed to unlock this app as well. The documents stored here are treated as originals.
Cloud. The deceased might have been using some kind of a cloud service such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox or some other service. These help store files and data not just in the hard disk but in remote servers that can be configured so that all the devises can access the data. OTP, passwords and emails are again crucial keys to open this lock as well.
Often, most used sites and programmes are left open on laptops or office desk tops. If you are able to access these devices, then just keying in the name of the site might open it up for you. Children and young adults are usually good with technology, so if you are unable to do this yourself, enlist the help of trusted extended family members to help you out.
Next time, we will go on a physical search of places to search for files, documents and paperwork. This is a tough time. We all need to just belt up and keep going.
Insurance companies are in focus as the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has received complaints about COVID policies not being offered and renewed. Atul Sahai, CMD of the New India Assurance Company and Monika Halan, Author of Let’s Talk Money shared their views.
“As far as New India Assurance is concerned, I don’t see this happening. This could be the approach adopted by some of the companies but in the wake of COVID, no new guidelines have been issued as far as we are concerned,” said Sahai.
“The need for health insurance has suddenly increased for most people. The new insurance buyer has got afraid that something may happen and is now running to buy insurance. Globally, insurance companies are struggling to understand this risk and to price this into premiums. So, different companies approach the cooling-off period differently. COVID-19 pandemic is a new event and everyone is struggling to find their balance with it and people seeking health insurance cover for the first time post COVID are in for a little bit of a rough ride unfortunately,” Halan added.
“This is a great time for the government and the regulator to set things right in terms of insurance,” Halan mentioned.
According to Halan, higher loading is expected for the new policy entrants.
“The companies will have to probably increase the premium for the entire age bucket. The price rise will be across the board and not specific to a person,” she mentioned.
Incurred Claim Ratio (ICR) is used to gauge whether this market is fair or not. The number is obtained by total claims paid divided by the total premium.
While explaining the current market condition, Halan shared, “If the net number is at 100 percent, then we are seeing a fair marketplace where after profit and cost, insurance companies are neutral.”
“According to data, the private insurance companies’ ICR is 53 percent, the standalone insurance companies’ number is 56 percent, and the PSUs are 92 percent, which means they are doing well. I think it is a complete regulatory failure because you are not being able to ensure that there is no gouging of the customer,” she further mentioned.
“We are not going to increase the premium till we tide over this crisis,” Sahai shared.
“Financial freedom is available to those who learn about it and work for it.” – Robert Kiyosaki Coronavirus pandemic has made us realize true importance of managing our own finances. In times like these when people are losing jobs, experiencing salary cuts, businesses suffering due to country wide lockdowns etc. we can understand why knowing about concepts like Emergency Funds is crucial. Vittshala, the financial literacy cell SRCC had the privilege to have ‘Monika Halan’ ma’am with us for E-Baithak- ‘Personal Finance Q&A with Monika Halan’ where she answered our queries and gave her insights in the field of personal finance. Monika Halan is a best selling author – “Let’s Talk Money”, adjunct Professor at Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, finance journalist a speaker and a writer on financial literacy, regulation, inclusion and consumer issues in retail finance.
When I wrote the raja beta and rani bitiyapiece last week, I had no idea that it would touch such a nerve. As of today, the post on my personal blog has been viewed some 66,000 times and my first tweet reached more than 4.5 lakh people. There were many conversations around the topic as people weighed in with their own experiences of seeing a new generation of entitled young men and women living off their parents but trying to save the world. One 2017 HSBC study says that 55% of the surveyed households in India were still supporting their children well into adulthood.
This phenomenon of sudden affluence affecting parenting decisions is not an India specific problem. Smaller families and sudden affluence are twin factors that give the kids growing in such homes far more bargaining power than before, not just in India, but in other regions as well. For example, economists Sebastian Galiani, Matthew Staiger and Gustavo Torrens show in a paper that over the past 100 years American kids have managed to capture an increasing share of the household surplus due to better bargaining power in the home.
While parenting is itself a challenge, managing to keep the kids anchored to prudent money mantras for the newly affluent is even tougher. It is indeed tempting to use the blast from the credit card to zap away the problems for the newly affluent, but good parenting is about equipping the next gen with life skills rather than just access to parental wealth. There are five key areas of awareness for newly affluent parents.
One, kids don’t listen, they watch. If you want financial prudence in the kids, then you need to exercise it in your own lives. If the difference between need, want and greed is not that clear in your money decisions, the fuzziness will pass on to the gen next. Do the dinner table conversations (I’m hoping that these happen physically and not through shared Instagram memes) sometimes revolve around buying new cars or high value gadgets or whatever for yourself that you don’t really need, but it is more of a JLT (just like that) spend? I’d worry about the signals that the kids are getting through this on such big ticket spends.
Two, honest money conversations on what is possible and what is not can begin from a very early age. Making the kids a part of the spending decisions gives them a voice and a stake in the outcomes. A new luxury car today vs an addition to the college fund are conversations that make the kids a part of the money decisions of the little unit called home. Peer pressure is tough and the desire to give in is very real when it can be bought rather than fought. Communicate that buying yourself into a group or social approval is a temporary fix and while the money might be there, but is that really what the child wants to do – buy approval?
Three, breaking down an unthought desire into its components and then allowing the child to make the decision. The Mac Donald’s Happy Meal comes with a burger, a drink, some fries and a small toy. It is what finance jargon calls a ‘bundled product’. I remember the time that my own kid wanted it at age five. I had no problem in buying it but broke down the decision for her – you don’t like fries, the burger is not the kind you really like and the drink on its own costs far less. Are we buying the toy or the meal? Are we buying because they are selling or we really really like the deal? If we do, sure, let’s get it. At age five she walked from the deal. And from many others after that.
Four, encouraging young adults to earn some money in the holidays gives them some idea of what it takes to buy that flat white so easily ordered and half drunk. Though I did not watch the series The Big Switch, reportson this reality show said that the very rich kids had a change of heart and habit when they switched roles with a poorer young adult. One of the participants is quoted in the story saying: “The first thing I did was hug my maid, driver and cook,” she says. “I thanked them for everything they had done to make me happy. My parents were really taken aback.”
Five, and this is the toughest, making money and what it can buy, a proxy for your attention and time is a slippery slope to financially spoilt rich kids. Figuring out that a small kid would rather play with mum rather than alone with an expensive gadget is a learning for a parent.
Parenting is about balance. To starve them of what your money can buy or over indulge can both have consequences. The best gift a baby gives the parent is the chance to reset their own lives one more time. Doing that is possibly the best parenting advice you can get.
Chucking a brand-new laptop into the family swimming pool to see if it was indeed waterproof, to barking into the phone to call the domestic help to raise the curtains that are two feet away from the bejeweled GenZ hand, to deliberately smashing a new phone after a fight with the parents. These are just some stories of kids in a premier Delhi school known for its fleet of uber luxury cars in the morning and early evening school drop and pick up hours. As one cohort of the younger millennials and early gen Z move toward the mid to late 20s, there is a worried group of parents who are watching in mounting horror at what their deeply loved raja betas and rani bitiyas are turning into. Bored, woke and high maintenance who need brands, clubs and luxury holidays to just survive, this bunch of rich young adults are still dependent on their parents for the lifestyle they take for granted.
Nikhila Chawla (name changed) is 25. She is a post graduate who carries very stringent views on gender equality and patriarchy. She is vocally politically far left. But is unable to find a job that earns anything, let alone sustain her lifestyle that befits the daughter of a rich Mumbai doctor. Chawla totally fails to see the contradiction of her woke views, her expensive habits and her reality. Two generations ago her situation would not have been an issue, since an arranged marriage would have solved the income problem. But this age cohort grew up with the new ideas of liberation and are sensitive to issues of gender and patriarchy but see absolutely no conflict on being dependent on the father’s income and wealth. Of being a ‘comrade’ while sipping sparkling water at the latest happening hub in town that she does not pay for.
It is a thin sliver of population. They account for just 8% of the 286 million households (1.3 billion people). But even 8% adds upto more than a 100 million affluent. This is a cohort that is both very visible and audible since the really rich prefer to stay quiet and the aspirants are busy working. A BCG Report puts this cohort to have grown at an average annual rate of 9% over the decade ending 2018. Of course, in a country of 1.3 billion, it would be wrong to typecast an entire generation with a broad brush. This story is just about one sliver of the population not the entire cohort. The opposite stories of the same generation of parents pushing for performance are equally strong.
This is the wedge of population that benefitted the most in relative terms from India’s 1991 reform. They were ready with the degrees and the fire in the belly to make the transition from aspirants to affluent happen. This generation grew up in a socialist country, lining up for water, milk, telephones, scooters and most other things. They gave it all they had once opportunity arrived in India and began living the dream of an upper middle-class life. Once they achieved wealth, they were determined that their kids would not repeat their own drudgery. This gave rise to helicopter parenting where problems were zapped out of sight even before they became manifest in their kids’ lives. But the newly affluent forgot that it was the desperate hard work that gave them the wealth boost, but by wrapping the kids in cotton wool they were taking away a key ingredient of success – fire in the belly.
The indulgence has had very different outcomes than imagined. Over lunch Rajesh Sethi (name changed), a rich Delhi professional tells me matter of factly, that it is the father’s net worth that now decides the education destination of the kids. He had in mind his son who wanted not just to go abroad to study but was choosing the most expensive course and city plus lifestyle expenses of course.
It would be wrong to blame the kids since they grew up with the promises of a good life forever murmured over the years by parents who just wanted the kids to be happy and stress free. Being happy also meant not working very hard to crack the very tough higher education entry exams in India, because papa would pay for an under-graduation degree in the best of the party capitals of the world. Indian parents, according to RBI data have forked out almost $5 billion in higher education fees in 2019-20 and another $2.4 billion for ‘maintenance of close relatives’. India spent 27% of its foreign exchange spent by individuals in a year on sending kids abroad to study and another 18% to maintain them.
Fire in the belly was what got the newly rich Indian rich and when they see their off-spring listless and entitled they worry about their future. Parental wealth will get them through but in an aspiring country like India with contenders for the pie rising out of the soil faster than before, the life skills needed to stay afloat might be missing. The grim realization that money is the goal but not the destination is just now dawning on the parents of the now not-so-young raja betas and rani bitiyas.
The real challenge for newly affluent parents is to bring up children who are aware of their privilege and are willing to use it to actually make a difference rather than just being keyboard and hashtag warriors. Not having money brings with it a set of problems. Having it, brings a whole new world of challenges. And there are somethings that money cannot buy – having sorted kids is just one of them.
Monika Halan is India’s trusted personal finance writer, speaker and author who helps families get their money decisions right.
मोनिका हालन की किताब हमें अपनी मेहनत की कमाई का उपयोग सही तरीके से करने की सलाह देती है.
पैसा जीवन में बहुत उपयोगी है। उसे हम मेहनत से कमाते हैं। पैसा चिंता का विषय भी है। उसका सही उपयोग किया जाए तो जीवन संवर सकता है। यदि हम उसका सही तरीके से उपयोग नहीं कर पाते, तो वह भविष्य के लिए समस्यायें खड़ी कर सकता है।
वाणी प्रकाशन ग्रुप ने एक ख़ास किताब प्रकाशित की जो पैसे से जुड़ी हमारी बहुत सी समस्याओं का समाधान सुझाती है। मोनिका हालन की किताब ‘बात पैसे की’ हमें अपनी मेहनत की कमाई का उपयोग सही तरीके से करने की सलाह देती है। उनके सुझाव भविष्य और वर्तमान को लेकर सरल और जानकारीपूर्ण हैं। मोनिका हालन ने अपनी बात को तर्कपूर्ण उदाहरण देकर समझाया है। इसे समझना पाठकों के लिए आसान है।
नंदन नीलेकणि के शब्दों में -‘अगर आप निवेश करना चाह रहे हैं…आप किसी भी उम्र के हों..तो इस पुस्तक को पढ़ने का यही सबसे अच्छा वक्त है। इस समय भारत में डिजिटल परिवर्तन हो रहा है। पुस्तक में सुझाए गए सिद्धांतों के अनुसार एक दफा अपनी व्यवस्था स्थापित कर लें। दोबारा उसकी देखभाल की जरुरत ही नहीं पड़ेगी।’
मोनिका हालन ने आपात्-स्थिति कवच निधि, स्वास्थ्य खर्च का सुरक्षा चक्र, मृत्यु पश्चात परिवार को सुरक्षित रखने के तरीके, निवेश को आरंभ कैसे किया जाए, रिटायरमेंट कोष की रणनीति किस तरह बनाई जाए जैसे मुद्दों पर चर्चा की है। किताब में मोनिका हिदायत देती हैं कि यदि हम अपने छोटे-छोटे खर्चों का हिसाब रखें तो हमारा घरेलू बजट गड़बड़ाएगा नहीं। खर्चे की पड़ताल जरुरी है। मोनिका स्वयं किताब में बताती हैं कि वे इसके जरिए जल्दी अमीर बनने के नुस्खे नहीं सिखा रहीं। न ही यह पुस्तक किसी ख़ास उत्पाद को खरीदने पर जोर देती है। उनका प्रमुख उद्देश्य ऐसी व्यवस्था के बारे में बताना है जिससे जीवन-भर की कमाई के बारे में हम निर्णय ले सकें और पूरे साल चिंता से मुक्त रहें। साथ ही किताब हमें यह भी समझाती है कि किस तरह हम अपनी वित्तीय योजनाओं को समझकर, नियमों को स्थिति अनुसार सुधार सकें।
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