“Set your goals high and don't stop till you get there” ~ Bo Jackson

There is a strong correlation between your investments and your goals. To make life simple, every goal must have an investment attached to it. To justify its presence, the investment must qualify in two tests viz. it must mature at the time of attainment of the goal and the maturity value of the investment must be adequate to meet the goal.

We have spoken a lot about the investment options that are available and how they can be customised according to your goals. Today we would talk about the latter, i.e. the basis of investments “your goals”.

Most people do not invest because of lack of excitement to achieve or lack of knowledge. “Plan for your retirement” may not excite you, but “Having Rs. 5 crore at the time you retire” or “Getting Rs 50,000 a month even after retirement” would definitely excite you. It's just a matter of choosing the right set of words. You have to make your goals simple and exciting and your financial advisor will take care of the need for knowledge.

Personal finance, saving and investments are terms which might scare you off, but a little modification in your perception and presentation of these terms can make things smoother to understand and apply. As a part of the simplification process, you must make your goals exciting, as the thrill will motivate you to invest for them and work to achieve them. Following are a few key points which can help you make your goals exciting:

Pen down your goals: We do remember what is important for us, what do we want to achieve at the back of our minds, yet it is prudent to write down your goals along with the target date. Writing down your goals will remind you constantly that you have to work hard to achieve them, you can go on check-marking the ones you've accomplished. You can review the list to track your status and edit them as per your requirements. So, whatever short and long term goals you have set for yourself, just write them down irrespective of how and when you'll achieve them.

“Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality” ~ Michael Korda

Step by step: If you are the one who is averse to investments, try your luck with investing for one short term goal. Start with a thrill, you may go for a one year debt mutual fund to actualise your dream of going for a vacation with your wife, the one which you have been postponing for dearth of money. After one year, when you come back from the vacation, you will not be the hesitant investor anymore, but an investment fanatic. The contentment of achieving one goal will help you in setting and working for the next goal. The joy which you will imbibe from this vacation will motivate you to invest for your next goal, and this motivation will set you on track.

Challenge yourself: If you feel you may not be able to conserve money from your income, to provide for your investments, “Challenge Yourself”. Your income is limited and you have a lavish lifestyle. Due to maintenance of your standard of living, you have not been able to own a house and it is your dream to have your own house. However, you feel setting a goal to buy a house is of no point since you will not be able to achieve it. It is only you who can help yourself at this point. Provoke yourself, start with a short period, say a month, develop a conviction that you will not waste money in parties, fine dines and shopping, and for this month you will limit your expenses to necessities only. After a month, when you see the extra money, you'll realize that your dream can be actualized. And at that point, the goal of buying a house occupies a place in your mission list.

Process driven: Make a list of short and long term goals. Break down your longer term goals into short term goals. Let's say you want to leave certain assets for your kids to inherit. This is a very long term goal. But before that you must provide for their education, marriage etc, these are relatively shorter goals which also in a way form a part of the former. Or you may want to be debt free five years down the line, paying off your credit card debt is a short term goal and is a part of your long term goal. Achieving your short term goals one by one will set you on the path to reach your long term objectives.

Achievable: The goals that you set for yourself must be exciting but attainable, else they will loose their charm. If today, you are hardly able to make both ends meet, you have other important objectives to fulfill, like your children's education, owing a house and you set a goal of owning a BMW after five years. You are most likely not achieving this goal. So, by exciting we mean goals which are thrilling and realizable.

Now, keeping these points in mind, once you are through with setting your goals, approach your financial advisor, who will help you in prioritizing your goals, allocating budgets and developing a portfolio to help you achieve your goals.

We have all made mistakes in past and most likely would also make mistakes in future. Making mistakes is not crime but is something human in nature.However, we must learn from past mistakes and failure to do so is most undesirable. When it comes to personal finance decisions, the best way of learning is by analysing the opportunity cost for our bad decisions.

Opportunity Cost:
But before we start, let us first understand what is 'opportunity cost'. The opportunity cost can be understood as

• the cost of doing any action measured in value terms of the best alternative that is not chosen or is foregone.
• a sacrifice value of the second best choice available to someone who has picked among multiple choices

Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and is used in decision making where there are scare resources to be optimally utilised. The concept can be applied beyond financial costs: you may apply it for lost time, pleasure or any other resource that provides some benefit. Thus, opportunity cost can not only help us in evaluating investment decisions but also can be universally applied to any decision that we take.

Analysing Wrong Decisions:
Let us now attempt to analyse our decision using opportunity cost and a few case studies. The case studies are random examples of what most of us usually are or have ended up doing in past.

Above is for illustrative purpose only. Assumptions: MF Equity returns: 15%. Debt returns: 10%. MF Cash: 7%. Inflation 6%. Post Retirement Inflation 4%. Returns on Kitty: 8%. Some figures are rounded off.

Including the above instances, we can short-list the following very common types of action / inaction that have lost opportunity costs attached to it...

• Planning for financial goals: Here the opportunity cost is often in nature of inability to meet the targeted value fully if we either delay savings for goal or invest in wrong asset class.
• Retirement planning: This is highlighted here since it has huge impact involved which are not very apparent to us and is often ignored. There can be huge opportunity costs in terms of the required savings to be done and the retirement kitty created if we delay or invest in wrong asset class. The biggest risk is that the kitty becomes insufficient to meet our expenses during retirement.
• Ignoring Insurance: Ignoring, delaying or taking inadequate insurance is very common. Lack or inadequate life insurance is something very scary since the idea of our loved ones left without any money in itself is unimaginable. Still most of us take inadequate cover without finding out actual cover required and instead directly start looking at products. The opportunity cost in absence of medical insurance is something which would now be very obvious.
• Idle money not invested: Due to financial indiscipline, we often ignore investing less substantial money on time in appropriate avenues and money is often left idle in form of hard cash or current / savings account balance. We must invest idle money, beyond that required for emergency, running expenses, etc., into liquid MF or similar schemes / products for the small durations of time available. A regular practice of doing so actively can help you good returns on idle money which is not visible to us now.
• Common investment related bad decisions.: If we can summarise, there would largely be 3 types of bad decisions w.r.t. investments:
  • Investing in wrong asset class as per investment horizon
  • Delay in starting investments or SIP
  • Investing inadequate amount
• Other bad decisions: Apart from above we also have many other common instances of bad decisions like...
  • Investing in 'Ponzi', 'Get Rich Quick' or 'Chain Marketing' schemes with hopes of making huge money!
  • Taking personal loans for avoidable reasons
  • Making cash withdrawals from credit cards
  • Not paying credit card dues on time inviting very high interest costs
  • Making delayed payments of utility bills, etc. attracting additional money for every instance

The famous and the most successful investor – Warren Buffet has said that “you only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong” to be successful. Indeed, many small things ignored add up and become significant enough to impact our lives. And bad investment / financial decisions are no different.

The following are the suggested ways that will help us go a long way in improving our financial situation over long term.

• Always remember that every financial action or inaction has some opportunity costs
• Procrastination or laziness is a big enemy for wealth creation
• Small things make big impact over time. Discipline, awareness and active decision making are the right habits to adopt
• Prepare comprehensive financial plan at the earliest. Do not shy away from seeking advice on small financial matters.

The idea behind this article is to make you aware that every financial decision has costs attached to it and that proper planning, discipline and timely action in our financial matters can help us ensure that we keep the wrong things to the minimum in our lives. A few wrong things are enough to overshadow the benefits from many rights things that we may have taken.

The two wonders of personal finance "Saving" and "investment" are often perceived as same by most of us. But, both these terms are distinct and have a very important role to play in our financial life. An investor must understand the difference and relevance of both the elements. And we have to participate in both activities to secure a sound financial future for ourselves.

To begin with, let's understand the meaning of the terms "saving" and "investment". Saving is nothing but the excess of income over expenses. So, if your monthly income is Rs 50,000 and your expenses are Rs 30,000. So your saving is Rs. 20,000.

This Rs. 20,000 helps you in meeting your upcoming family emergencies, buying clothes for a cousin's wedding, or buying gifts for your family this new year, or meet other unexpected expenses, etc.

This saving can be in the form of cash at home or money lying in your savings bank account. When this saving is put to use with a view to generate a return, this process is called investment. So, when you use your saving and buy a mutual fund, or an FD, or put it in real estate, you do it because you want to generate an income on your money. So, these are investment activities.

Although your money lying in your saving account is also giving you a return of about 4%, but it isn't your investment, because the return is not even able to cover the cost of inflation. If Rs. 2000 can get you a third AC train ticket from Mumbai to Delhi today. Five years later, you would need around Rs 2800 for the same ticket. Now if you deposit Rs 2000 in your saving bank account today, it would give you around Rs 2500 after 5 years, which will not be enough to provide for the ticket. Therefore, money kept in a saving bank account is not enough to cover the cost of inflation and hence is not an investment.

This means money looses its value over time because of inflation, and in order to combat with the evil of inflation, we must Invest. A major differentiating factor between saving and investment is the purpose behind engaging in each. And that is where we shall give a deep thought and decide if the goal for which we are saving, will be met by simply saving or if we need to put in more efforts and "invest that saving" and actualize our goals.

Saving is generally not backed by a goal. The money is being saved because that money is not in use today, or is saved for meeting any uncounted expenses. Or even if there is a purpose it isn't a defining factor of your life, it can be saving for buying a mobile, or a dress, etc. On the contrary, there is a specific purpose behind investing which has a significant impact on your life. We invest for buying our dream house, we invest for our children's education, we invest for our children's marriage, we invest for our retirement or may be we invest simply to create wealth. These goals can not be achieved by just saving. Imagine saving Rs 10 Lacs in a bank account @ 4% interest for meeting your daughter's wedding expenses which is planned 10 years hence. There will be a huge mismatch between the funds you have in your saving account then and the funds you require. And this gap can only be filled with investment.

Therefore, it is important that in order to achieve our life goals, we invest. And each goal must be aligned with an investment. For each goal, a particular type of investment is required which is determined by the investment horizon, amount required, your financial position, risk taking ability and various other factors. Your financial advisor will help in selecting the investment products ideal for your goals.

The bottomline is it is important to save and to invest the saving. Both of them are independent as well as interdependent. You must be able to draw a boundary between saving and investment, and not just save for your future. Saving & Investment is an ongoing process and should not be disrupted. So, if you are saving and not investing or worse not saving at all, then you must get your act together as your financial health is dependent on these exercises.

There is none better way to look at simple ratios to evaluate your financial situation. Companies and analysts are much more comfortable using ratios rather than actual figures for better understanding and decision making.Nothing binds us as normal investors to speak of our own financial situation in terms of ratios. We are sure that the practice would not only make it simpler to evaluate and understand situations but also interesting enough for you to engage in the exercise.

In this article, we present you with few personal finance ratios that can use used to evaluate your financial health. Assessing these the personal finance ratios and fixing your own targets or benchmarks will also go a long way in bringing prudence and control in your own financial situation. It can thus open a new world of possibilities for you...

The following few ratios have been devised based primarily upon common sense. These are not standard, academically defined ratios and you may change the composition of the ratios according to your own needs. Further, you may even devise new ratios that may better suit your unique needs. The objective is to incorporate the use of ratios in our personal financial lives to make more interesting!

Savings Ratio = Actual Savings / Post-tax Income
Savings Ratio indicates how much you are saving out of your post-tax income for any period. The higher this ratio, the better it is. However, merely savings is not enough. The savings should be in a right asset class. Money kept ideal in bank accounts or other non-productive avenues do not qualify as savings. One may however cover asset building EMIs, like for home loans, insurance premiums, mandatory savings from salary, etc in savings. The idea is understand how much you are saving in building assets and securing your future. A good savings ratio is anything over 25%, The more it is, the better.

Expense Ratio = Actual Expenses / Post-tax Income
The Expense Ratio indicates how much you are spending out of your post-tax income for any period. The lower this ratio, the better it is. Typically Expense ratio should not be beyond 75% of your income. Expenses can be further broken into fixed expenses & variable expenses where fixed expenses would cover expenses like car / personal loan EMIs, rent, tuition fees of children, salary to servants, utility payments, etc. Variable expenses would include expenses on grocery, shopping & entertainment, etc. One can then also look at the proportion of fixed and/or variable expenses to post-tax income to better understand your spending pattern. Typically for any households having higher Variable expense ratio would mean that more unnecessary expenses are likely being made which needs to be controlled.

The relationship between Savings & Expense Ratio is also interesting since Savings + Expenses = Post Tax Income. One should ideally treat Expenses as net of Income & Savings rather than treat Savings is the residual after meeting all Expenses. By this approach we can limit & control our Expenses while making required Savings.

Debt Repayment Ratio = Debt payments / Post-tax Income
As the name suggests, the Debt Repayment Ratio can be used to understand the portion of your post-tax income that you are spending on payments of loans. Such loans would typically consist of home, car, personal or private loans. This ratio should be ideally below 40%, the lesser it is, the better. If it crosses over 50%, one can consider oneself in sort of some debt crisis and should act to minimise the debt portion.

Debt to Assets Ratio = Total Liabilities / Total Assets
You must be familiar to the Networth concept which is the balance after deducting all liabilities from the assets of an individual or a company. The Debt to Assets Ratio is on similar lines and speaks about the relative proportion of debt to the assets of an individual. The lower this ratio, the better it is. Typically, 100% or above of debt, as proportion of your assets, is unhealthy. However, due to liabilities of home loan and car, it is not unusual to find even higher proportions of Debt to Assets Ratio. While considering assets, one can either consider only disposal assets or total assets or derive ratio for both. Disposal assets can be considered better since liabilities can be paid off from such assets only and not those assets which are currently used for personal consumption, like for instance your residential home. A lower Debt to Assets (disposal) ratio would mean that you have greater flexibility to manoeuvre your financial situation.

Liquidity Ratio = Liquid Assets / Net Worth
The Liquidity Ratio indicate what percentage of one's net worth is invested into liquid assets. In liquid assets, one may consider cash, bank balances and investments in cash & equivalent investments of very short maturity period. Networth, as said earlier, would be the balance of your assets after deducting all your liabilities. This ratio should not be either too high or too low and depending on your situation, a comfortable range can be between 5% to 15%. A higher ratio would indicate that you are not making productive use of your capital and that money which can is invested for better returns are lying ideal. A lower ratio would indicate that you run a risk of going short of cash to meet normal expenditures or to meet any emergency needs.

One can also view this as Emergency Ratio and can keep a few months of expenses in liquid assets in absolute money terms. This is more recommended it cases of individuals having high networth.

Conclusion:
The above ratios with ideal figures are for broad guidance. Typically, depending upon your life stage, there can be acceptable deviation from the ideal figures given above. For eg., for an unmarried person or a working couplel, the Savings ratio can be higher as compared to a family with one working spouse and children. We also need to consider special cases like in case of retired persons, where there is no post-tax income. Thus in such cases, low Savings ratio and high Liquidity ratio is acceptable while Debt to Assets Ratio and Debt Repayment Ratio will be a must.

Although the above personal finance ratios cannot be used for complete financial planning but they can definitely serve as a valuable reference points for better insights to your personal financial world. We encourage all readers to undertake such exercise at regular intervals of time and set benchmarks to be met with the help of your financial advisors, if felt necessary.