My article in Outlook Money (Journey to Financial Freedom)

Efforts, done with the right intent, and done long enough, do get noticed. The key is to keep doing the efforts, and never ever give up.

I am learning all this in a very different way. Dealing with the publishing of any article in a reputed magazine or a book from a reputed publisher is never easy. Patience is the key in all such cases. A lot of my friends are keen to know the launch date of my book. For all of them, i have to plead three things : patience, patience and lots of patience. The publishing industry is very different from whichever other industry we work in.

While the book (From The Rat Race to Financial Freedom) launch may take some more time, below are the snapshots of my article on Financial Freedom that got published in the 30th October issue of Outlook Money Magazine (Page 68). 

For those who may not be aware of this magazine, it is the No. 1 Personal Finance magazine in India.

So, while you keep patience for the book launch, here is a drop from the ocean :

Cheers

Manoj Arora

Top 13 Symptoms of leading a Desultory Life

I sometimes wonder how come most of us go through this journey called "life" without having any concrete plan for it. We have a clear plan for almost everything that we do at our workplace or in our personal lives, but we just seem to ignore our own life completely on this aspect. On deeper thinking, i realized 3 primary reasons for the same:

1) May be, we do not want to believe the fact that life has a clear beginning and also a definite end. While we celebrate birth, we mourn death. These are the 2 milestones in between which you must cherish every moment and make your life worth living.

2) We fear death to an extent that we do not want to talk or even think about it. It is like closing your eyes to avoid an upcoming storm. Doesn't help. Rather, get ready for the inevitable and plan for it. Plan and execute this span of life so well that you have no regrets as you lie on your death bed. Do not repent for it in the end. Life is a beautiful gift from god.

3) Worst, we have the inherent feeling that although death is inevitable, it will probably not occur to you. You may be seeing others falling around, but how can you believe that the same can happen to you. Trust me, it will happen :)

4) We just fail to see the bigger picture of life. We are so engrossed in our day to day life that we simply fail to halt, take a step back and look at the bigger picture before we proceed with the next step.

I do not know what is your reason. It could also be a mix of all the above reasons. Whatever be your reason, it is always going to be more meaningful to come down to the reality of life and the facts surrounding it. If that is the case, then let me ask you a hard hitting but a very important question. Do not ignore it. Try to answer is in a simple Yes or No.

Do you have a written plan for your life?

If you were honest, I know that most of you answered it as a "No". Some of you even tried not to answer it because you still have the feeling that you need not answer it. Life is going on anyways. Some of you also thought that though you have not written your plan, but you surely do have a plan.

But let us face it. Unless you have clearly defined (and documented) the three critical aspects of your life ie your life's Mission, Goal(s) and Strategy, you can be sufficiently assured of the fact that your life is being lead. It is being lead, not by you, but by situations, circumstances, people and everything else except you.

Well, it is so no rocket science why i say that. If you do not even know why you are existing on this planet and what is the purpose of your life, then all the actions you are doing on a day to day basis are driven by the environment and circumstances around you. Let us take a very rudimentary example. Let us say that you are on a beautiful highway driving the best car that you can think of possessing, but unfortunately you are not aware where you are headed. If that is the case, and you reach a crossroad, then how do you decide which path to take. In such cases, you would probably tend to take the path of least traffic or best road condition or anything else that attracts you. Your decision is driven by the circumstances on the road and not by the destination. This situation is exactly similar in our lives. Our life is a beautiful highway road, you are that dream car. If you do not know where you are headed, you take actions in your life depending on what you see around you rather than what you truly want to do.

Are you among those who have forgotten to define and document your life's mission and goals. You may not be sure. So let me try and help you with this.

Having seen most of the people around me in a similar state of life, i tried to figure out how their day to day behavior was different from those people who had clear goals and mission in life. I accumulated all those symptoms together and tried to list down the top few symptoms which i could commonly see across most of such unfortunate souls.

Below is a list of the symptoms that you can check for yourself. These symptoms will tell you whether you are driving your life or you are being driven by circumstances and situations. If you happen to relate to a few of these symptoms, it is high time you take some action and try to define the mission of your life. Your day to day actions would ultimately be driven by the mission in your life. Another word of caution before you scan through this list. There is nothing wrong if you happen to be displaying these symptoms. This is just to make you more aware of the reality of life so that you can take appropriate actions to correct the course before it is too late. So, here you go.

• Though you are doing well in your career, you often reach at crossroads where it is becoming more and more difficult for you to take a decision whether to aggressively go for the next step in your career option or to slow down and take care of your family, your health and your forgotten passions of life.
• You believe that the childhood time was the best time and student life was anytime better than today's. Not only you believe in this, you also express this more often than not, in your casual conversations with your friends and family members.
•  It is often difficult for you to chose the kind of role you should be performing at your workplace. You often seek advise from your "well wishers". Unfortunately, most of these "well wishers" and "free advisers" are also lost and themselves in need of direction. So, all the best with the advise that you get.
• You are earning good money. You do not know whether to spend this money lavishly and live the life "in the moment" or save money for your and your family's future needs. You tend to toggle between these two extremes periodically.
• You frequently start various personal initiatives and hobbies like joining a guitar class, exercising, cycling, walking, jogging, gym etc. only to leave them in between. Not only that, you have a very "valid" reason to leave every initiative every time - your work priorities, your kids, your spouse etc..
• You do not know how much money you want to earn in life. How much of it would be enough? How much do you need which would ultimately prove sufficient to lead a financially secure and a peaceful life.
• You occasionally want to leave the hustle bustle and din of city life and lead a peaceful, relaxed life in a relatively smaller town or village. But you do not know what will you do post retirement from job. Life is likely to be aimless after retirement.
• You are earning well but are still not truly "happy". You seem to be unable to defend your inherent happiness, which gets stolen by adverse circumstances, situations and people around you. This "loss of happiness" happens to be quite frequent.
• You do not feel that the colleagues at your workplace follow the right path in life. The irony is that you also follow the same path, as you do not see any alternatives.
• You get frustrated that age is catching up.
• You feel hollow sometimes of the so called "achievements" till date in life.
• You seem to be working extremely hard, whether it is holidays, weekends or late night. You are always overloaded with work because you are good performer. In the meanwhile, you seem to be missing on smaller beauties of life like having occasional healthy discussions with your kid on a school subject, sitting and chatting with your spouse across the breakfast table with no specific agenda, spending time with your parents, playing Ludo or Snakes and Ladders with your kids, chatting with your neighbor etc.
• You hate Mondays and you love Fridays.

Did you relate to any of these ?

If yes, then wake up and start thinking about what is that single purpose that you want to serve while you are on this planet? What makes you happy & fills you with bliss? Read good books to explore more. Establishing a mission for yourself will take time. It may take weeks, months and sometimes even years. But trust me, all time that you have in hand is futile unless you have established your life's mission.

For God sake, do not lead a desultory life. Do something significant in life.

Thomas Edison once said,

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

Cheers

Manoj Arora

Always carry a book with you

According to one of the biggest surveys carried out in US, where data was taken from all across the globe, an average human being is likely to spend 4 years commuting to and from workplace, 3 years opening junk emails, and another 6 years in one or the other queue (whether online or physical), waiting for his or her turn. This accrues to a startling 13 years of your life !!

Now, assuming that an average individuals life span is 80 years, half of which (ie 40 years) goes in doing mandatory activities of life like sleeping etc, what it effectively means is that you are spending approximately 1/3rd of your life (13 out of available 40 productive years) in an absolutely unproductive manner. When i first heard this, i was shocked. Later on, i realized that this is not surprising at all. It has been a known fact since ages that success lies within knowing such finer aspects of life, which goes unnoticed by any average human being. 

We learnt a great deal about success from such "smaller" things in life in one of our earlier posts - Big Things Will Happen By Doing Little Things Right

Given these startling facts, one of the simplest and yet the most powerful time management strategies that you can implement is to always carry your favorite book with you - whether it is a hard copy or a soft copy in your favorite palm top or MP3 player. While others are waiting in line or in traffic and complaining, you are hooked to the wisest knowledge available from across the globe and directly feeding your brain with the best of the ideas possible.

Abraham Lincoln once said : 

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

That is so true. Just imagine what kind of ideas books can give you. I have an habit of always keeping one book in my bag just for that extra unproductive time. I always have some MP3 audio books or motivational speeches in my mobile, which i listen to while commuting to and from office. 

They already had a huge impact on my life. While i was going through my journey of financial freedom, i read 500+ books in less than 2 years (almost a book every day). I cannot explain you enough, the value this habit of book reading added to my journey. It is something difficult to explain but i can relate that these books helped in each phase of my journey starting from keeping my momentum going, to giving me new ideas, to even inspiring me to write a book of my own (From Rat Race to Financial Freedom). These repositories of wisdom helped me every time i was in a fix. Almost everything that i achieved in this journey is courtesy these books that i read. If you ever happen to visit my house, i would be delighted to show you a drawing room full of books. I still feel, i need more. 

As goes a famous old saying :

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Yet, i hardly see many people in the habit of reading good books after completing their formal education. On the other hand, all it takes is one great idea from a great book to transform your life or reshape your character.  How successful you are in your life will not be determined by how hard you work but how great you think. And what can be a better source of ideas and thinking pattern than a book well written. The person you will be 5 years from now will be determined by two primary factors: the people you associate yourself with & the books you read.

I remember playing badminton when i was 10 years old. I was just an average player. But whenever i used to get a chance to play with someone who was superior (in badminton skills) to me, i would always come up with those special smashes and drop shots that would make myself feel proud of my game. What changed when playing with a more skilled player? I was the same, my knowledge about the game was the same. It is just that i was now involved with someone better than me. This involvement just uplifted my entire game. It is precisely the same thing that happens when you read books from the greatest minds all across the globe. You will see your thinking and idea generation capacity just gets a face lift, and you start rising to a whole new level of wisdom.

Many of the wisest and most knowledgeable greats of this planet are ready to share their depth of knowledge and experience with you, through their books. Why would you not seize this opportunity? It is all up to you to reach out to the next book in your nearest book store and make a difference to your own life.

Nothing can do what a book can do. Lifts you out of your life... to a whole new world, whole new perspective. A book is like a dream you're borrowing from a friend.

Happy Reading

Cheers

Manoj Arora

14 ways to know if you are stuck in the rat-race and 1 way to come out

Many of my friends and colleagues understand that they should not be in a Rat Race for the rest of their lives. But in most cases, confusion harbingers clarity. How would any of them know whether they are on the right path in their life or they are also a part of this dreaded and mindless rat race?

The irony is that most of them are in the rat race and don't even know this. If i tell them the fact on the face, no one is going to believe me. On the other hand, i am also shirking my duty as a friend if i am not letting them know that they are a part of this vicious circle which has no end. I want that they should have a fair opportunity to come out of this race. They will keep running throughout their life and in the end would not achieve anything substantial to be proud of. They ought to take decisions and do something different in their lives else the time is running out for them. They can make an impact on this world, it is just that they need to wake up to the fact that they are also a victim of how we were brought up in our society. They need to take charge of their lives before it is too late.

Faced with this dilemma, i thought of giving a list of symptoms of being stuck in a Rat Race. How do i know these symptoms? I have been through each one of them at some point in my life, and so i have a first hand experience. These symptoms will help anyone find out whether they are also running this meaningless race. So, here we go..

If you face one or more of the following situations in your personal or professional life, you are very likely running a Rat Race - a race which may not yield anything worthwhile in the end in spite of all the hard work you are putting in.

1. You work long hours at a job you are not truly passionate about.

You may have friends at your workplace, you may be able to work through your day happily but do you truly get charged up by thinking about what you do at your job everyday? Does each morning bring excitement to you when you think about your work? There is a very simple way to find out whether you are truly passionate about your work or not. Assume for a moment that you do not have any financial worries in your life. Would you still opt to go to your workplace everyday even if it does not pay you anything ? If the answer is No, then you are surely a victim of this social setup which trains you to be a rat in this rat race. You better try and find a mission of your life. You are working hard but you do not know where you are headed. It is just like driving a car at a great speed but don't know where to go. It is like paying any game with no target in mind, which would ensure victory. What will happen if you keep doing what you are doing today? You life will end up in frustration and you will not achieve anything meaningful. You will only regret at the end of your life.

2. You hate traffic.

You are one of those who spend at least an hour commuting to and from office. I often hear my colleagues cribbing about it, but they wont do anything other than cribbing. They never start thinking about what they can do to change the situation. They are all driven by situations.

3. You worry about the next day at office.

At the end of the day, you do not fancy cooking. You just want to have a drink or have a dinner and go to bed, because you have a planned set of activities for the next day. Your mind is planning for the next day as you go to bed. You have stopped finding happiness in smaller things in life.

4. Hobbies !! What are they?

You used to have a few hobbies, which you feel, are a thing of the past. You may say that you would revive them some day but nothing is going to change unless you change what you do on an everyday basis.  If you look at the last few years, you have just gone busier by the day. The competition at your workplace just got a little more, as you climbed a few corporate ladders. To climb further, it needs more of your time and energy. With all this, who has the time to pursue the old hobbies, which you have come to believe are only a children's forte.

5. You have stopped finding happiness in smaller things.

With all the hours that you and your spouse work, you have forgotten the habit of doing things together. The joy of making a meal together, the joy of watching the TV together, the joy of playing with the kids together, the joy of just chatting and spending time together - all these do not seem to have a great value in your life anymore.

6. The children are more a burden than joy.

Kids want your time, not the jazzy toys. They can happily play with a broken and a shabby toy if you are ready to spend your time with them. Instead, we go the other way. We do not have time for them though we have money and are ready to buy a new fancy toy for them. Sad, doesn't work that way at all. The equation just needs to be reversed.

7. You feel that you are becoming more and more alienated from your family.

Family vacations, once or twice a year, is the only family time you spend with the joy, assuming you do not carry your office mobile or laptop with you during the vacation. You deserve the same joy everyday in your life.

8. You believe in TGIF.

TGIF (Thank God Its Friday) has become synonymous to your Freedom today. The excitement,  energy and bliss that you get on Friday evening are some of the traits of what a financially free person experiences everyday in life. How good would that life be?

9. Your weekend just flies by.

Come the weekend, by the time you have fixed the dripping tap, cleaned the messy areas of your house, done the grocery shopping, watched the TV soaps, caught up on washing and ironing, dealt with the paperwork in preparedness for Monday morning's presentation at your workplace, your weekend has gone. As it happens every week, it turned out to be an anti climax. You have to now wait for the weekend once again for another 5 days.

10. You are always connected.

There is no escape either on the weekdays or the weekends from some thread at your workplace because the new technology ensures that you can be intruded in any part of the world at any time of the day or the night.

11. You never have enough money.

You earn good money but it never seems to be quite enough. There is always something extra to buy - for your spouse, for your kid or for your house. The bills just drill a bigger hole in your pocket every month. You are always waiting for the next salary credit in your bank account. Perhaps, if you changed jobs or got the promotion or worked something extra, it would have helped you meet your expenses. Sad, but you know that this change is not going to help. It has not helped till now and is not likely to work in future also.

12. You have a lifestyle (disease).

Though long working hours have brought in a nice car, a nice house and a nice overall lifestyle, it is very likely to also bring stress, and with it , all the lifestyle diseases. It has helped you stay ahead of your friends, both in lifestyle and lifestyle diseases.

13. You don't know how to effectively deal with the money you earn.

You are earning a lot, but you are not dealing with what you are earning. You always seem to be short of time to think on how to invest and manage your money wisely. Sad but true, you leave your family and your health to earn money but do not know what to do with the money you earned. Isn't it sad and ironical ?

14. Your gadgets are more a stress than help.

You have accrued a lot of modern gadgets, with the assumption that would at least bring some comfort to your life, if not happiness. They definitely did bring excitement for some time. But as your greed for the latest gadget went spiraling up, you see yourself spend most of your weekend time dealing with these gadgets and the issues that come with them.

Now, if you sit back and think through all of the above points, you might feel like you are on a hamster treadmill. You are running hard, very hard, just to stay at the same place. 

It is not necessary that you are experiencing all the above traits, but even if you are experiencing a few of them, you are a part of this race, which is self defeating.

You can continue to stay in this race as long as you want. It is a very comfortable zone, because you have got used to it. You can spend your entire life in this because that is what you see the colleagues around you doing. But in case you want your life to have a some meaning and do not want to regret at the end of your life, you need to come out of this race.

Financial Freedom provides one such way to come out of this race. I have shared my learning during my journey from rat race to financial freedom in a book with the same title. You will have to chart your own path and walk your own journey. You have to face your own challenges and you have to find your own ways to deal with your situations. But you can definitely reap the benefits from what i experienced and documented in the book.

Key is to take a decision and take the first step. Rest will follow. I wish you all the best

Cheers

Manoj Arora

The Price of Success

Success principles always remain the same.They never change.

Well, if the above statements are true, then have you ever wondered why only a selected few % of people enjoy the fruit of success while the majority lot quit the journey much before they could taste success. If success rules and principles have remained the same and are easily accessible to anyone, then what stops most of us from just following the rules and go and achieve success.

One of the most common reasons that i have realized over the years as to why most people cannot see success is that they never understand the fact that success will never come in the first or the second attempt. It is very rare if it does. But for most of us, it might take numerous attempts before we can finally succeed. How many attempts? I have no idea. But successful are those who "keep trying till whatever time it takes to succeed". Focus on the words "whatever time it takes". It is not the number of attempts or the number of failures. It is as many times as needed, which essentially means that failure is never a choice. If you have that kind of mindset that failure is not a choice and you are ready to do whatever it takes to be successful, that is when you would be able to taste success.

It is very well said that "Winners never quit and Quitters never win".

To explain this fact, let us just forget the goal of your life or your current success criteria for the moment. Let us take the simplest of things in your life, and see whether you succeeded in the 1st or the 2nd attempt or you kept trying for as many attempts as needed to succeed. You will realize that, in most cases, it would be the latter. 

Remember when you started to learn walking or you tried learning to tie your shoe lace or when you started to write the first few alphabets of a new language. Unless you were born with exceptional talent, it would have taken you humongous effort and an undying spirit to succeed in any of these goals. Well, the big difference was that you were neither ever short of a positive mindset, nor were you bound by any thought restrictions at that age. So, the success that you achieved, even for relatively smaller goals at that age, was after numerous failures and countless unsuccessful attempts, but the essential principle that you followed (may be unknowingly) was that you kept trying till you succeeded. 

Continuing to try unless you achieved your goal is what i call as the "price for success".

Having understood that we have to pay the price for success and we would definitely achieve our goal one day if we keep striving, then the next question that might come to your mind is that why can't everyone pay the price and achieve success. 

Well, attempting success in your goals of life today is slightly more complex than the goal of learning to tie a shoe lace. Not only that, the environment within and around you has also changed. This change also does not help you in your journey by any means. 

It is not difficult to introspect and realize what has changed from our childhood till now. A few of those changes are as follows. These changes are applicable to most of us unless we have made sincere attempts to overcome them.

1) You have picked up a lot of negative thought process in the journey from your childhood, so you have relatively less faith in yourself and your abilities today, than what you used to have at that age.

2) You would be lucky to get someone to encourage  you in your failures at this age. You had your parents with you when you were a child. They would applaud you even if you tied the shabbiest of the shoe lace, as long as you made an honest attempt. How many such appreciations do you receive today, whether in your personal or professional life,  when you fail in any sincere attempt?

3) You have forgotten to dream and have relinquished the belief that you can ever achieve them. This is perhaps the most unfortunate happening in your life, and this trait might just take the longest to inculcate back in you. It took me something like reading thousands of self help books, listening to hundreds of audio tapes from the most successful  folks around the world, meeting hundreds of positive minded people, attended uncountable seminars before that seed of dreaming germinated back.You would not find these people around you. You will have to go and make sincere dedicated attempts to search for them.

4) You have not identified the goal or the mission of your life.

To achieve success, you will have to overcome all this negativity that you  picked up over the last few decades. It is not easy to do that. 

Most people want to be successful, but so few are ready to pay the price. The moment you identify your goal and start your journey, you will start encountering failures. Paying the price would be picking yourself up, time and again, until you succeed. Some of us will do this for a while, a few of us will do for a while longer, but a very few of us will consistently do this until they succeed.

The winners in life keep trying long after losers have given up. They never never never give up.

This is what paying the price is all about.

As i sign off this article, i remember some of the famous quotations that had a big impact in my life and helped me overcome some of those negative traits (and in fact also convert this negative energy to positive energy) i picked up during my journey from childhood till this age,

"Success will not lower its standard to us.  We must raise our standard to success."

"One who does not accept defeat from his heart in spite of not being powerful, he can never be defeated."

Cheers

Manoj Arora

9 Life lessons from 'Snakes and Ladders' Game

As I watched my two daughters play the traditional Indian game of "Snakes and Ladders", I was realizing, at every step, that there was a striking similarity this game has with our life's journey. There are so many lessons that this game can teach us, including how to go about executing the biggest game in our hands i.e. "our own life". 

Consolidated Account Statements (CAS) for Mutual Funds

What is CAS?

Unlike a normal account statement issued by a mutual fund (MF) house, which provides details of a particular folio or a scheme, CAS provide the status of all your folios in different fund houses at one place. CAS use your PAN number to combine the details of all your folios and offer you information about investments, redemption,  switches, dividend payouts and re investments  among others. CAS also mention your nominee registration status, mode of holding and know your-client (KYC) status for each folio and scheme.

SEBI Regulation
Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has directed fund houses to send a common monthly account statement to investors who transact in any one of the folios of the funds and a common half-yearly account statement for all non-transacted folios. The consolidated account statement (CAS) will also include information on the transaction charge paid to the distributor.

How frequently CAS is issued?

1) CAS would be issued in April and October of every year. 
2) CAS would also be issued for the month when you transact in any one of the schemes held by you. In this case, CAS would include details of only those folios in which you transact.

What are CAS benefits?

If your investments are spread out with various fund houses and different schemes, keeping a track of all theses schemes can be a task by itself. CAS would ensure that you do not have to track the account statements of different Mutual Fund schemes separately and thus would help you reduce your paperwork. CAS would also help you to track the quantum of your Mutual Fund investments at one go at the time of portfolio review or otherwise.

What are CAS limitations?

CAS would be unable to give you a status update on non-financial transactions such as updating your residence address or change in bank account details, among other things.CAS cannot provide details of transactions under demat mode as well.

How can you request for your CAS Statement?

The procedure is very simple. 
You can request for your own CAS through the services provided by any of the following links:

1) www.karvymfs.com/platformservice

2) www.camsonline.com/default1.html (Click on Mailbackservices)

In any of the above links, enter your email address and a password (this password will be used to open the PDF file later). Once you submit this small form, you would receieve the CAS statement in the email and you can open the same with the password you provided earlier. It does not take more than 10 to 15 min to actually receive the CAS statement through email, and it can save some serious time and headache for you.

Tracking your funds can be challenging. Get a complete picture of your transactions and portfolios in a single place in your Consolidated Account Statement (CAS). This saves you lot of headache and time, and eases your paperwork. Time saved is money saved. Get your CAS statement today and enjoy your extra time :)

Cheers

Manoj Arora

Get Inspired and then compete with yourself

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”  said Roosevelt, a former president of United States. 

Now, that is something for inspiration of the day to go on and start improving yourself. Remember that Inspiration is contagious. You might not even know that you have just inspired someone. 

While inspiration is good, many of us confuse that with another word which is "Competition". 

Competition is a word so commonly heard now a days that hearing the word itself triggers a stress signal in our brains. Some of us believe rightly understand that competition is definitely needed in life because it helps you to push your limits, and one of the known ways to continuously improve is to compete. But in today's cut throat environment, moving ahead of your competitor might have become even more important than improving ourselves. It is very simple to prove. Just by hearing the word "competitor", what thoughts originate in your mind? Cut throat, ruthless, move ahead, win-lose, etc. OR it was something like learn new things, improve yourself, become a better person etc. If it was the latter, then it is fine but if it was the former lot, then you ought to think - Are you competing with the right competitor.

If the objective of competing is to improve yourself, then what sense does it make to compete with anyone else. The best way to improve yourself is to compete with yourself. I agree that you need to look at others sometimes - but that should be to get the "inspiration" and not the "competitiveness". 

Who knows that if you compete with someone else (may be even the person who inspired you), then you may be limiting your abilities and opportunities to improve beyond the threshold set by your competitor.

I have been a very health conscious person but for the last few years, i have been somehow ignoring the morning walks and jogging. As i was going through my other priorities in life, i happened to meet one of my old colleague after many years. She was suffering from serious back related problems and so was her husband. We just chatted around and i realized that how lack of care for our body and general fitness can lead us to situations from where it may be difficult to recover fully. Another Facebook friend of mine used to daily share his experiences with his cycling stuff in the mountains - how he has been improving as a cyclist, how he has been loving nature while cycling in the morning. He also used to share some great snaps of the mountain ranges as well.

Now, these 2 friends ultimately inspired me - the first one with a negative energy (Remember that negative energy is also an energy which can be converted to your advantage) and the second one with his positive energy. Taking inspiration, I started doing my walks in the morning around 2 weeks back and kept competing with myself to continuously improve. Today (after 2 weeks), i have reached a stage where i can walk + jog (in almost 50:50 ratio) around 2.6 kilometers every morning. I did not go and ask my friend as to how much they walk everyday or how much they improved. Having taken the inspiration once, now the competition is only with myself.

So, look around yourself. 

There is so much to learn from everyone around you. 

Find your inspiration, and then compete with your own self to reach the pinnacle of success. This not only leads to a stress free improvement but also poses no boundaries to what can be achieved in life. 

The same concept applies to Financial Freedom as well. Once you have crystallized your dreams (your inspiration), then it is completely up to you at what pace you want to get financially free. Anything and everything is possible. Just get your priorities in life right.

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” said Walt Disney, whose one single dream which started with a mouse made him the most successful entertainer in the world. Find your inspiration, stop giving excuses and move on to compete and improve yourself every day.

Cheers

Manoj Arora

Why you also need Financial Freedom

 

Many people make the mistake of thinking that all the challenges in their lives would dissipate if they just had enough money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Earning more money, in and of itself, rarely frees people.

It's equally ridiculous to tell yourself that greater financial freedom and mastery of your finances would not offer your greater opportunities to expand, share, and create value for yourself and others.

Financial freedom does not end at collecting a huge corpus of money. Accumulating money is a means to attain a sense of security. It is a pre requisite to get freedom, and not freedom by itself. It is NOT THE END. You start exercising your freedom after you have taken care of the money part in your life, else most of your life would be devoted in the worship of money and related pursuits.

For a moment, let us forget about the money part.

Let me ask all of you a very simple question:

"What does financial freedom mean to you ?"

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that all your household expenses were met through "some" source of money other than your job, business or wherever else you are actively involved with today, and there was still some left over money at the end of the month. If you get that kind of security, what change would that bring to your life? How would that change what you are doing today?

"What would you stop doing? and what would you start doing ?"

Are there some old cherished forgotten dreams that flare up? To me, that would be real freedom...freedom to think, freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom to do what you truly want to do in your life, something that you are really passionate about. The passion could be about pursuing your old forgotten hobbies, helping others, contributing to the society, spending more time with your family or anything else that you have always been thinking about but unable to pursue because your family security or lack of money just did not allow you to.

This personal freedom from financial constraints in life can change the course of your life. Personally, i feel , it is the single most significant goal that everyone must strive for.

Here are some quotes from one of my favorite authors on this subject. I grew up reading some of his bestseller books which ultimately changed the way i used to think about money.

Robert Kiyosaki (of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" fame) has been an inspiration for me. Here is how he feels about money and financial freedom:

1. Never say you cannot afford something. That is a poor man’s attitude. Ask HOW to afford it.

2. Find out where you are at, where you are going and build a plan to get there.

3. If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

4. Education is cheap; experience is expensive.

5. When going into business don’t just find great partners, BE a great partner.

6. When people are lame, they love to blame.

7. The hardest part of change is going through the unknown.

8. The only difference between a rich person and poor person is how they use their time.

9. Face your fears and doubts, and new worlds will open to you.

10. Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow.

I really like the last one - If you have been thinking about truly getting rich, you have got to start today. There is so much help available all around you. Push yourself. Motivate yourself. 

You are making your own future ...and you are doing it every day, this hour and this very single minute. Your actions today are defining your destiny of life.

Wake up and fight for your own personal financial freedom. It is truly worth it !!

Cheers

Manoj Arora

Know more about LTA or LTC Claims

Most of us do take out time for at least one vacation in a year with our family. While this is good, so many times we just fail to take the tax benefits provided to us by the government. There can be various reasons for not availing tax benefits like these. Either we are afraid of the paper work, or we are too busy otherwise, or we do not realize the importance of saving taxes or it may be just that we are not fully aware of the rules pertaining to Leave Travel Concession (LTC)/Leave Travel Assistance (LTA)

Difference between Financial Year and Assessment Year

 

Sometimes, things as simple as the difference between the Financial Year (FY) and an Assessment Year(AY) can give you the right perspective to look at things.

Tax Exemption Provision for Capital Gains through Property

 

Real Estate Capital gains is one of the biggest single transaction gains that you would ever have in your portfolio. If the Capital Gain is high, the tax liability would obviously be one of the highest. In one of our recent posts, we studied in detail about the tax liability on capital gains on account of real estate or property. ( Preserve your Property Gains ). 

Hence, it becomes all the more important to understand what you can do with the capital gains that we have so as to minimize or completely eliminate any such tax liability. A small understanding of facts here can save us lacs of rupees in terms of tax savings in a single transaction.

Here are some facts that you should be aware of :

1) All tax exemption provisions for capital gains through sale of property (as listed in the subsequent points) are applicable only if you have incurred Long Term Capital Gains. There is no tax exemption possible for Short Term Capital Gains. (Refer Preserve your Property Gains ).

2) Re-invest in buying new property : If you invest part  / full amount of your capital gains in a new residential house property, then you are 100% exempted from taxes on Capital Gains. Remember that this re-investment needs to be done between the time period of either a year before or two years after the sale of the original residential property.

3)Re-invest in construction of a new property : The same benefit as given in pt 2 above is also available if you invest your capital gains (either partial or full) for the construction of a new residential property. Remember that the new property construction has to be done within 3 years of the sale of the original house property.

4) Partial Capital Gains Re-investment : If you invest, lets say, 70% of our capital gains, you get tax exemption on the 70% part of your capital gains. You will have to pay long term capital gains on the remaining 30% gains.

5) The newly acquired residential property (as in pt 2 above) has to be held for at least 3 years. If you sell the new property in less than 3 years, then you will have to pay tax on the entire capital gain that was tax exempted earlier and also the applicable capital gains on the newly acquired property.

6) You can also save taxes on capital gains by investing in specific bonds issued by National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and Rural Electrification Corporation. This investment needs to be done within a maximum of 6 months of the transfer of the original house property. Also, these investments in bonds cannot exceed a maximum limit of Rs. 50 Lacs. Just like re-investment in property, the investment in bonds has to be held for a minimum period of 3 years.

7) While you are doing these re-investments, some of which may take time to materialize (may be even years), where do you hold your capital gains in that interim time period which tells the government that you intend to reinvest these capital gains within the time frame given in all the above options, and are hence not liable for taxes? The right procedure for that is to open a separate CGAS account (Capital Gains Account Scheme). You need to put all your capital gains during a financial year into this CGAS account (which can be opened with any bank) before the end of the financial year in which you did the sale of your property. The amount deposited is deemed to be earmarked for purchase or construction of a new residential property, and is hence not taxable during that year.

In nutshell, never sell a property for capital gains in less than 3 years. 

Once you have crossed the 3 year threshold, there are so many options available to re-invest your capital gains to avoid taxes.

Cheers

Manoj Arora

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