PERSONAL FINANCE
My personal finance journey started during the Covid lockdown in 2021. I was attending online college which was boring and not much else was happening around either. That is when I started watching YouTube videos regarding personal finance and developed an interest in it. Covid had caused the markets to crash in March 2020 and since then we were in a continuous bull run, with no end in sight.
Shoutout to bekifaayati, LLA and CA Rachana Ranade for their amazing content!
This was the perfect opportunity to start my investment journey. I and my dad opened our demat accounts together and started exploring this new world of stock market and investing. At the same time, I was earning some money freelancing as a video editor and motion graphics designer. I felt the need to document my income and expenses to keep track and avoid over spending. That is why I started with Excel, maintaining sheets for my income and expenses.
Income log
Investment log
Expense log
As my interest started growing I experimented with various different investment and trading instruments. I tried my hand at MFs, delivery, intraday, F&O, crypto, foreign stocks, SGBs, all of it... I lost some money to losses as well but found it really interesting to explore these instruments. After a year of trying I figured out what was right for me. I couldn't work a day job, which I would soon be getting, and be occupied trading stocks at the same time, so mutual funds were the right choice for me.
I really enjoyed diving deep into the nitty gritties of the MF industry. At this point I was learning more from actually doing than I was learning from watching or reading. Exploring the vast MF industry in India, it took till Aug 2022 for me to align with an investment strategy of my own. I figured that passive (index) investing is the best for building long-term wealth. I started working at Studium around March 2023 and started investing heavily with the advent of a new income source. I was having fun learning the concepts and meanwhile managed to generate double-digit annual returns. At the time of writing this, Sept 2024, I'm on track to reach a 7-figure AUM in MFs, excluding other investments in crypto and SGBs.
After maintaining the Excel sheets for a couple of years, I started adding more complexity to them. Generating visualizations out of all the available data helped me get insights on my spending, income and investments. This helped me make better decisions about my portfolio allocation, spending habits, income sources, etc.
Looking at my interest in finance and investments, my parents wholeheartedly supported me to manage my own money. My parents like many others, had never put their money in anything other than Bank FDs until a couple of years back. After I proved to be successful in growing my own corpus I started making a plan with my parents, for managing the household investments and retirement planning for my parents. This implied recording the daily household expenses and making a plan to reach an investment corpus capable of surviving withdrawals equal to expense amounts, while taking into account inflation, taxation, lifestyle inflation and other such factors.
Being a young 23 year old, my risk appetite was much higher than that of my parents. Thus, I realized the freedom of making mistakes or losses, that I had while crafting my own portfolio would not be there while dealing with my parents' money and so I had to tread lightly. At the time of writing this, I'm in the process of constructing a well-balanced asset portfolio for my parents including MFs, rental income, gold and so on, which would last them through their retirement. I am also preparing to appear for the NISM 5-A Mutual Funds Examination to formalize my MF knowledge.
Throughout these 3 years of learning, I have truly fallen for finance, tech, startups and investment instruments to the point where I'm more excited about finance news than partying, movies or travelling. I hope to keep learning new stuff everyday and I hope that I can bring together my love for design and finance in some of my expression or work.