BASIC HABITS FOR FINANCIAL PLANNING

Table of Contents

Once you know the fundamentals before planning the financial goals, you have to gain some basic habits to manage goals and how to achieve it 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 their epitome for financial planning. Goals must be SMART, and also materialistic. The goals can be short term, midterm, and long term.

SHORT TERM GOALS	MIDTERM GOALS	LONG TERM GOALS
Short term goals should be planned for the duration of 6 months – 2 years	Mid Term goals should be planned for the duration of 3-10 years	Long Term goals should be planned for more than 10 years of duration
The safety of the principle is the top priority. So don’t take a risk in investments.	Safety of the principle and returns should be equal to the inflation rate (7% – 8%)	Safety, returns are top priority and the return has to be more than the inflation rate (10% – 14%)
Recurring deposit, Premium savings account are the best place to park your amount	Fixed Deposit, Liquid Fund, G- Sec Bonds, Debt funds are the best place to park your amount	Mutual Funds, Index Funds, Equity Market
The goals can be Dream mobile, Dream bike, Laptops& PC’s, 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 Home, Children Marriage, Retirement Corpus, etc.

Note: The goals are not relatively to be the same as mentioned, it can vary as per your needs and desires.

DISCIPLINE, CONSISTENT & PRESISTENT:

Discipline, more than a skill everyone should be maintaining and practicing in financial managing, 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, Persistent is an important attribute that a person should have while planning financially. Some people might wonder, what is the difference between consistent and persistent? In a simple way, Persistent always stands ahead of consistency, Persistent means one should be consistent in all the situation irrespective of any circumstances.

Almost, these three attributes are interlinked. When we maintain these three habits in our planning, our wealth creation starts shinning with a sparkling future.

NON-PROCRASTINATION HABIT 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 account only yields 2.5% – 3%, most of us park our total asset in the bank without knowing that, if a bank becomes bankrupt you 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 the inflation by min 10% annual return, you should not be a procrastinator to take a risk and to 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 get 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 made 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 you 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, 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 upgrade version, but the real fact is mobile ‘A’ will be having overall the 95% of mobile ‘B’ has and that 5% which the mobile ‘B’ is having 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 to take some hours to think about “Do, I really need that product?”, “Do I really 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 and 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 the inflation in long run.
These three powerful habits (discipline, consistent, persistent) will make perfect in managing your financial goals towards early retirement and moving from the middle class to upper-middle class and then transforming to 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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