Once you know the fundamentals before planning the financial goals, you have to gain some basic habits to manage goals and how to achieve them through financial planning. They are basically
- Goal Setting
- Discipline, Consistent & Persistent
- Non – Procrastination
- Delayed Gratification
Goal Setting Habit for Financial Planning:
Foremost, one should be ready with their goals, which will be the epitome of financial planning. Goals must be SMART, and also materialistic. The goals can be short-term, mid-term, and long-term.
Short Term Goals | Midterm Goals | Long Term Goals |
|---|---|---|
| Mid Term goals should be planned for 3-10 years | Long Term goals should be planned for more than 10 years duration | The safety of the principal is the top priority. So don’t take a risk in investments. |
| Safety and returns are top priorities and the return has to be more than the inflation rate (10% – 14%) | Safety of the principle and returns should be equal to the inflation rate (7% – 8%) | The goals can be a Dream Home, Children’s Marriage, Retirement Corpus, etc. |
| Fixed Deposit, Liquid Funds, G- Sec Bonds, Debt funds are the best place to park your amount | Recurring deposits and premium savings accounts are the best places to park your amount | Mutual Funds, Index Funds, Equity Market |
| The goals can be Dream mobile, Dream bike, Laptops& PCs, accumulating a fund for school fees, Domestic family trips, etc. | Goals can be a Dream car, Children higher education, a Family Foreign trip, etc. | The goals can be Dream mobile, Dream bike, Laptops& PCs, accumulating a fund for school fees, Domestic family trips, etc. |
Note: The goals are not relatively the same as mentioned, they can vary as per your needs and desires.
Discipline, Consistent & Presistent:
- Discipline is more than a skill everyone should be maintaining and practicing in financial management, saving, and investing a particular portion of your income The discipline here we speak about is, saving every month. In simple, we call it a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP).
- Consistency is required for building a strong wealth creation. Once you develop the disciplines in saving and investing the money, there should be some proper measures in doing that with consistency.
- Finally, persistence is an important attribute that a person should have while planning financially. Some people might wonder, what is the difference between consistent and persistent? Simply, Persistence always stands ahead of consistency, Persistence means one should be consistent in all situations irrespective of any circumstances.
Almost, all of these three attributes are interlinked. When we maintain these three habits in our planning, our wealth creation starts shining with a sparkling future.
Non Procrastination Habits for Financial Planning:
Procrastination means, in a simple term ‘delaying’. In financial planning, the habit to be avoided or quit is procrastinating. Once you plan your goals, you must be a non-procrastinator to achieve the desired heights in financial goals.
The Big Risk in life is not taking any Risk. If you don’t take any risk, you will not learn, so as, you will not earn.
An individual becomes a procrastinator when he fears the risk of failure. Even after learning that bank savings accounts only yield 2.5% – 3%, most of us park our total assets in the bank without knowing that, if a bank becomes bankrupt we will be given only 5 lakhs (earlier it was only 1 lakh, as per DICGC – Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation)
Once you find out, that your investments have to beat inflation by min 10% annual return, you should not be a procrastinator to take a risk and park your money in investments with risk to get the reward as desired.
Delayed Gratification Habit for Financial Planning:
In this modern and fast-moving era, we are attracted to modern technologies and their development. The world, nowadays, is designed in a way that makes people grasp the daily updates and keep on consuming new goods, which eventually makes our DNA gratify all we come across. This is known as Instant Gratification.
Instant gratification will no longer make you rich, it will keep you in debt. To increase your instant gratification the marketing system had initiated to offer consumers with 0% EMI, bike EMI, car EMI, peer-to-peer lending, and other all sorts of financial support, to buy a product as soon as they see.
These offers tempt you to own any products, even if you don’t have money in a wallet or bank. The funny part here is, that we might not require that ‘x’ product since we already have it in our home, but then buying it in the name of offers.
For example, let us assume a mobile company launches a mobile model ‘A’ at Rs. 25K, and in the same month, it launches another model ‘B’ at Rs. 30K. It will be an upgraded version, but the real fact is mobile ‘A’ will have an overall 95% of mobile ‘B’, and that 5% of the mobile ‘B’ will have extra than mobile ‘A’ will not be used by most of us. We all tend to buy mobile ‘B’ by their marketing and ads on television, and all debt-building financial plans.
What does Delayed Gratification do?
Delayed Gratification is something that makes your mind take some hours to think about “Do, I need that product?”, “Do I have enough money in my pocket?”, “Do these EMI will increase my Debt burden?”
How to Employ Delayed Gratification:
- Whenever you come across any products on television or in shopping malls, don’t tend to buy suddenly, as if you will miss the whole world if you don’t earn it.
- Unless your electronic goods/gadgets got complete repair don’t change them frequently.
- Always plan well in advance to buy a product start saving as a short-term goal, and achieve it.
- If you need a product, at least give a time period of 24 hours to 7 days, to think about it in all parameters and you can also review it too.
In these ways, you can develop your skills in delayed gratification.
Conclusion:
- Friends, once you have developed these habits and skills in personal financing, you can plan your goals.
- Once you have planned your goals, start saving for your goals accordingly, and invest them wisely to beat inflation in the long run.
- These three powerful habits (discipline, consistency, persistence) will make perfect in managing your financial goals towards early retirement moving from the middle class to the upper-middle class, and then transforming to the rich class.
- Develop the habit of delayed gratification, which will be the prime factor of your financial planning habits which will transform to create your wealth.
This subject is completely taken from practical sense from most of the successful financial leaders and even from my mentors and myself.
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