SIPs

Discipline – not money – for financial independence

Affirmative action, compounding, Financial Independence, Human Brain

Yesterday I was listening to a talk by Keith Cunnigham. He is an author of multiple books including the book “The Road Less Stupid”

During this talk with Joe Polish, Keith asked a very pertinent question and I paraphrase it here- “If you were to look back at your 3 financial decisions seriously would you have been better off by not having taken those decisions”

I started thinking about my major decisions and one of them was buying a house. I have written a full post earlier also on this – that it was not a decision I would like anyone to take because it chokes the financial bandwidth – if you are buying it with a loan. If you are buying it all cash then its a good asset or taking a loan of the amount which gives you some kind of tax advantage then its worthwhile.

But then I started thinking again whether I would have been better off financially by not buying the house. On a theoretical calculation, the amount of installments I am paying on my mortgage, if I had been investing the same amount in equities or mutual funds, because of the compounding over 20 years, I would have been much better off to buy this house today and still have lots money left over.

However when I think on the flip side, by buying the house and having monthly mortgage payment, I had to exercise a tremendous amount of discipline to ensure that the payment was done on a given date. I am not sure I had the maturity at the time of putting up SIPs and I was financially illiterate to ensure that I block of the amount into an investment on a monthly basis.

Which brings me to the bigger point – for financial independence – which I have devoted a lot of my posts on – has very little to do with what you earn. It has more to do with what you invest automatically. The key word over here being automatic.

If you think you can have the discipline to ensure consistency every month , to invest on your own, chances are your brain will play games and you will find multiple excuses for not investing. On the other hand if the money will go out of your account automatically even before you get to use it, then you will find a way to manage your finances with the remaining money.

To come back on Keith’s point, yes I would have had a better financial position, provided I had the discipline to ensure my monthly investments.

How are you doing on the financial discipline side, look forward to hearing your comments.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Advantage small investors – SIPs

Affirmative action, asset allocation, compounding, Financial Independence, Habits, Uncategorized

This is a continuation on my rant for doing Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs)

A lot of times I hear my friends , especially female friends say this….. my father / brother / husband invested in a specific stock Rs100,000/- and the stock has never recovered back and he lost so much money, so I will never invest.

I have literally had to coax people to understand the fallacy of the argument. Losing massive money is an outcome of getting in the market without doing your home work. If you listen someone else and do your investment or you see the stock market going up and you throw a dart at any name and buy the shares then you are inviting trouble.

First and foremost if you don’t understand about the ways companies work, operate, don’t get into the market on your own. There are so many ETFs which you can buy or MFs you can get. This helps spread the risk over multiple stocks.

Second even within these always ensure you are buying regularly in small tranches. By using the SIP facility you get to average over time as well as cost so even the fall in prices is actually an advantage for you.

Unlike big investors who have to look for a big price advantage to invest their millions or billions, for the small investor this is an advantage. They can enter the market at any time because the SIP will take care of any gyrations that the stocks go through and will end up with a very large core inthe long run.

The key is that you are not investing lump-sum, you are investing small amounts and you are investing systematically and you are letting compounding play its role in the long run, then your returns will be similar to the overall market

In the LONG TERM, and this is a very important point, in the long term the stock markets have given compounded returns in double digits. If you can spare small amounts of money every month for an extended period of time, its mi days boggling to the corpus you can create. In my earlier posts I have given ready to use charts to help you compute.

However if your time horizon is short then its better to put money in debt instruments so you are sure about your returns. These returns are small single digits but they are guaranteed.

Take your first step, start an SIP and get financial independence.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Relentless- Part III

compounding, Financial Independence, Habits, Marketing, Uncategorized

Even passive activities can be relentless

Last 2 posts I have been talking about being relentless with respect to Marketing and sales of various kinds

Today I will be talking about how I realised that the systematic investment plans or SIPS are a different kind of relentless activity.

I have mentioned multiple times that you should give a mandate to your your ETF or mutual fund to deduct the amount directly from your account and invest.

On one level this becomes a passive activity because you are no longer involving your brain to make a decision.

However we have also noted that being relentless is a habit which is needed if you want to succeed systematically rather than episodically.

So where’s the paradox.

If you have to become wealthy then you have to invest relentlessly on a regular basis. A systematic investment plan is also a regular, consistent activity a.k.a relentless. The only difference being that you don’t need to tax your brain. You are automating the process of being relentless for your investment.

To that extent it’s an ideal opportunity….you have outsourced your relentless activity to a system….and you can become wealthy on the way

Think about it…..small amounts of money invested relentlessly…taking advantage of the magic of compounding…can get you financial freedom.

Till next time,.

Carpe Diem!!!

Investments as confidence builder

Financial Independence, Uncategorized

I have been writing about how investments can help in getting financial freedom. Have written extensively on how even a few percentage points of differences can make substantial differences in your earnings in the long term. Have also shared about how having different buckets of investments can also help you plan your vacations or other activities, which can make you happy.

Yesterday I was reading a book by Dean Graziosi – Millionaire success habits. While this book is not about investing styles and strategies, I would highly recommend you reading this book for the overall enhancement in the quality of your life. It helped me identify a few blindspots which I didn’t know I had.

In one of the chapter’s. he talks about stacking some money from whatever you earn to increase confidence. This was a new take on a topic dear to me.

I have also written earlier about how even very small amounts invested over long periods of time can make you wealthy, because the amount is never the issue…. it is the duration and the interest rates which determines how wealthy you can become.

Dean’s logic is that when you stack even small amounts, it gives your brain the satisfaction that there’s money for a rainy day and therefore you feel better, more confident and your decision making improves.

I would think confidence is a precursor to multiple things other than just pacifying your hyper active brain and taking decisions. When you are confident, you are buy definition not fearful. As per a study human beings have 70-80 thousand thoughts in a day out of which more than 70% are negative thoughts. Since our brain still has “fight” or “flight” response to most things these negative thoughts spiral into some of the other kind of fear.

Fear can be from you losing your job to your health to speaking to an unknown person or speaking in public. Most of the fears however boil down to either not having money (food) or health which are the most primal fears going back to the time when we lived in forests and hunted for food.

By stacking money and investing it you can give your brain positive inputs so it does not go into the fight or flight mode.

In addition the compounding equation starts playing. An ideal way to do this would be putting regular amounts into SIPs from mutual funds or into SIPs of ETFs. You can start SIPs in India from as low as Rs500/- (USD 7/-) per month.

Most people, like Tony Robbins says so often, over estimate what they can do in one year but under estimate what they can do in a lifetime. This Rs6000 (Rs500*12months) will become close to Rs100,000/- (USD 1500/- ) if invested for 20 years at an interest rate of 15%. If every year they were to invest a similar amount, then after the 20th year, EVERY YEAR, even if they don’t invest anymore they will definately have Rs100000/- coming without effort and securing their future.

Now if you know that even the small amounts of money that you are stacking will ensure your future, you would be able to take on your “present” with more confidence. And if you make your “present” better, your future will automatically turn out to be better because your future is based on the foundation of your “present”

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