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Twin Secrets
To Save More,
Forever
V S BADRI NARAYANAN
Terms of Use
We are now in 1959-60 when your grandparents or possibly even your parents
were heading the family.
Do remember in those days, it was rare, if not impossible, for women to go for an
employment or earn money. So it was mainly the head of the family who was a
male and perhaps the only earning member in the family.
From his single income, he would be supporting his aged parents (your
grandparents), his brothers (your paternal uncles), his unmarried sisters (your
aunts), his wife and children.
As you may be well aware, family planning was unheard of in those days and
hence the number of brothers, sisters and children would be quite many.
From his limited income, he & your mother were running the household which
was
Feeding and clothing all these people and also
Giving decent basic education to your uncles, you and your
brothers so that you can get employed,
Getting your aunts & your sisters married (which is a remarkable
achievement by itself)
Not to mention the medical expenses of the aged people.
On top of all this, they probably even managed to buy a piece of land and
construct a small house.
Even if they did not do this, they did not leave a mountain of debt for you and you
siblings to service.
As you are well aware, joint families are extinct now. When the parents
themselves are sent to old age homes or left to rot on their own, where is the
question of supporting brothers or sisters? And hence the family consists of
husband, wife, one child or at the most two children. And in most households,
both the parents go for work. With women well educated, they earn as much as
their husbands, if not even more. So the family has considerable disposable
income.
Given the additional income and the smaller family size, we should normally
expect prosperity and happiness. The reality is however just the opposite.
There is so much financial insecurity in most families. And according to a
nationwide social research, the main reason behind most familial disputes is
money-related.
This is really funny because everything, starting from wife going to work to having
fewer or no children, is based on economic criteria only.
And that is not the end of story, either. If we take a hard look, almost everything
that we think is ours, right from the home that we reside in to the cell phone we
are using, is owned by somebody and we are paying EMIs.
With little money and lots of people, there should have been lots of anxiety and
mountains of debt.
Likewise with more income and less people, prosperity, joy and happiness
should be the order of the day.
More importantly, what was the secret of the success of the earlier generation?
(If you are anxious to know the secret and skipped the previous pages, please go
back and read the entire stuff. Only then you will really appreciate the Secret)
The additional PIN for their credit cards required for online transactions?
Absolutely not!
What they were writing down were the income (once a month entry) and
expenses (on a daily basis).
(I can hear you saying “Yeah! My dad has 40 diaries from the year he started
working full of details like bus fare or milk. But that’s foolish! I wonder why he
wasted all his time doing that!”)
What he or they did was not at all foolish but something very profound
Researchers and nuero-physicians have found out that the process of actually
writing something down, leaves a permanent imprint in the memory. Its really
important to know that even those few minutes which were spent in writing, we
have to be necessarily aware.
We can be mechanical when it comes to signing our credit card charge slips (in
fact, most of us do just that) but if we are to write down the expenses for the day,
we must necessarily need to invest put some effort in tracing and recalling what
we did with the money. And when we do that on a regular basis, we become
more aware of our money. That’s the power of writing things down.
In this context, it is worth bringing to light some of our own habits that drain our
hard earned money, although unconsciously.
We seldom know, despite all the technology at our command, the balance in our
bank accounts or for that matter the amount of money we carry in our wallet or
handbag. I had the privilege of speaking in various Rotary and Lions Clubs on
the aspect of financial freedom. And when I asked the members about the
money they were carrying on their wallet, most did not have a clue. If this is the
status of the elite of our society which has access to the latest in IT, what to say
of the masses?
Again, I have observed lengthy queues on 15th and 16th of alternate months in
front of the Electricity Board offices (last days in Tamil Nadu for making utility bill
payments) and a majority would be the office goers wearing ties and carrying
helmets.
Likewise, the number of Income Tax assesses who file their IT returns on the last
couple of days is huge and often well chronicled in newspapers with
photographs.
And it is said that a good portion of banks’ revenues come from the late fees from
their credit card holders.
RBI has announced that the amount of unclaimed matured FDs in nationalized
banks alone runs into a few hundred crores and if we take into account the
deposits with other banks and institutions like post offices, it would be much
much more. That is the level of seriousness to which we address our principal
amounts.
Our previous generations did not stop with just keeping track of the money by
recording their incomes and expenses. They did one other thing and that was
Budgeting.
You would perhaps recall the hectic midnight discussions between your parents
especially when festivals like Deepavali would approach. Your father would get a
festival bonus within which the entire event has to be managed. Any shortfall
would be met from the contingency funds. So, they would budget 60% of the
amount for clothes and this would be further sub-divided into budgets for dresses
for individual family members. 10 – 15% would go for crackers and the rest for
making special sweets or dishes and possibly a movie that would be released in
that time. And once they did this, they would strictly adhere to the budgeted
amounts but also tolerate a small deviation if it was worth it. And that was how
they made festivals enjoyable as well as affordable.
Contrast this with the current situation. With the advent of credit cards, it is no
longer necessary at all to have the money to buy things. And because we pay by
just swiping the credit card which is nothing more than signing the charge slip
with a flourish (often without even verifying the amount), we do not even
understand the gravity of our purchase. And when the bill comes a month later,
we often take recourse to the MAD factor (Minimum Amount Due) and then pay
an exorbitant interest on the unpaid amount for some more time to come. So,
there is often no planning before the purchase and no taking stock of what we
spent after the event as well. The result is there for all of us to see.
But Budget is not all that. It is merely a limit that we set for ourselves based on
the importance of the expense or our affordability or both. Lets take the case of
eating out and entertainment and let us assume that we have set a budget of
Rs.2000 for this for a specific month. If that amount is based on certain birthdays
or anniversaries in the family or to celebrate any achievements that are likely and
if this amount doesn’t eat into our savings goal, then it is a fair budget. But if
there is no budget or if this amount was pulled out of the wind, then it lacks any
sanctity and is unlikely to be respected.
Why people tend to buy a cell phone, for example, for twice or thrice the amount
that they had originally earmarked? That original amount itself was not arrived at
after careful consideration, in the first place. And given our ability to justify any
and all of our actions, we do not even feel the pinch of our excessive spending.
Having a budget that is well arrived at and spending within that amount, gives
tremendous power to the person and the family. But this is not easy because
anything that involves effort & discipline is seldom pursued with vigour and easily
abandoned. Hence the deplorable status of the budgeting exercises at the
national level and the organizational levels as well.
It can be clearly seen that by keeping a record of the incomes & expenses
regularly as well as following a sound budgeting system, our fathers and theirs
led an extraordinary life within very limited means.
It therefore follows that if we follow these two golden principles or Secrets with
our higher incomes and much smaller family sizes, we would certainly have
higher savings without sacrificing the quality of our life.
(We know what you are going to say and have pre-empted your concerns)
Although conceptually and emotionally this might appeal to you, we know fully
well that it will not get implemented even in letter, leave alone in spirit.
Why are we so sure? Simply because we hardly do any writing these days.
When is the last that we wrote a letter to our parents or even to our friends?
We send an email or send a sms or just call up. The volume of handwritten post
cards or inland letters has shrunk drastically in the last couple of decades thanks
to our lethargy and also to the alternatives that are now available.
So, to expect someone to take a diary and start noting down the expenses
regularly is to ask for too much, atleast for the 99% of the population. And that is
just the beginning.
If we are to get some benefit out of this exercise, we must arrive at some
patterns in spending. And to do that, we must regularly write down our expenses
and also add the figures for individual expense heads during a month.
As such we think that we are doing a favour to somebody by just writing the
expenses. It is quite unlikely and perhaps even impossible, to write legibly and
do the totaling as well.
And if we are serious about the budget, we need to consciously keep track of the
actuals vis a vis the budgets which many would consider as a no go.
But then unless we do these two things, there is no way that we can even have a
clue of our money status.
People have over time, tried different models to help them keep track of their
money and we will see a few of them.
Some enterprising people thought about making this system available in the form
of a notebook with columns for the expense heads and the rows for the individual
days of the month. This is certainly an improvement over the plain diary but the
same disadvantages persist. You still need to write down regularly and what’s
more you are stuck to the limitation of the number of expense heads in the book.
And then you need to total the amounts, which we have already seen as
cumbersome.
And when personal computers started become affordable, a few zealous people
felt that they have cracked this imbroglio when they started using a spreadsheet
for this purpose. True, you do not need to do the totaling up on your own
because the program would do it, if properly set. But to use it in the first place,
one needed to know the mathematical formulae and set them in the spreadsheet.
This was not a skill that everyone had and hence only those who had the
willingness to learn and implement it could take advantage of this medium. But
this was also not without its share of flaws or limitations. After a few entries, the
user would feel that it would be better to have an additional field or a new facility
which will again involve programming and more importantly testing. And thus
what started as a very interesting project would soon end up as a pain that takes
a lot of time and effort without the commensurate benefits.
Further, only the creator of the spreadsheet program would be able to use it and
hence the entire task of recording the expenses of other family members too fell
on this person. Hence, of the many people who started on this road, only a few
survived.
Those who were looking for something simpler and easier to use, tried personal
finance software programs, most of them developed in the US.
Given the high level of functionality and features that these software products
offered, they required an elaborate initial setup running into several screens
asking for hundreds of data points. This really put off even the enthusiastic
people because they either did not have the required information or did not have
the patience to do it.
Further, these software products were designed for the US market which is quite
different from the Indian flavour and the terminology used was also quite alien to
our context. Hence, these otherwise reputed and great products failed to gain
acceptance, even in the pirated mode.
At this juncture, if it appears to you that people were keen but were hampered by
the lack of availability of a good solution, we would like to set the record straight.
Most of them who started earning high salaries at quite early years in their
careers, felt that there was no tomorrow and also had very high confidence that
they could continue their lifestyle forever. And when the spouse started
contributing to the family kitty, this became even more reinforced. And our
economy too moved dramatically from one of scarcity to plenty which led the
present generation to pursue consumerism like their western counterparts. With
the availability of easy credit in the form of personal loans or the credit cards, sky
appeared to be the limit for most families.
Austerity was the last thing that they even wanted to hear, let alone practice.
So we are now in a situation where people have PCs at home without quality
software to manage their money and at the same time are facing several money-
related issues, such as:
a. Not knowing where their hard-earned money was going. Many people are
finding themselves back at the ATMs to withdraw money but without a clue of
where their earlier withdrawal went.
b. Paying bills at the last minute or even late hence coughing up penalties in
addition to wastage of time and mental agony
c. Unable to make sense of the bank and credit cards statements. Even the
statements from the tech-savvy banks would show the description a deposit entry
like XLG 908909, which doesn’t really say anything at all. The issue is further
compounded in a credit card statement which shows only the name of the
merchant establishment that could be different from the name of the shop
patronized by us, leading to lot of confusion.
NRich Software P Ltd, started with the Mission of “Making Readily Available,
Useful, Easy to use, Affordable and Robust Software Products to Millions World
Over”, launched Enrich Software. Our objective was and is, very clear.
We want every person who has with a computer at home to become familiar and
gradually intimate with his / her personal finances so that he / she takes powerful
decisions and eventually Save Much More Money from the same income.
With this objective in mind, Enrich was developed specifically for the Indian user.
We tested it many times so that our customers do not face any major challenge
at their end. To help them use it without any support whatsoever, we designed it
on the same way that we would normally earn and spend and added relevant
help available within the software at the touch of the key. By keeping the manual
intervention as low as possible, we were able to keep costs down and hence
made it really affordable for an average Indian family.
It is excellent if you can write down the transactions like your parents in a diary or
a notebook and that is a great way to start.
1. Trail of Cash expenses and income. Let’s say that you have withdrawn
Rs.5000 from your bank account either by ATM or the regular process today. A
few days later when you go to the ATM again to withdraw cash and ask yourself
“where did all that money go?”, you are unlikely to get any answer except
perhaps some big ticket expenses. Although you had spent the entire amount,
there is no clue on the outflow. And you continue to do it week after week or
month after month and you are still clueless. By logging the transactions in
'Enrich', you will have a clear track of your cash outflow and inflow too!
Credit card statements are worse because a restaurant that you have patronized
might be registered under a different name for the Credit card purposes and the
other name will only be mentioned in your statement. This leads to lot of
confusion and doubt in your mind because you do not remember having done
any transaction with the supplier as mentioned in the statement. The credit card
statement from 'Enrich', on the other hand, will clearly state that on 29th Jan, you
spent Rs.565/- at Lancashire restaurant with family on a special occasion. Again,
I rest my case.
Likewise, the Top Incomes report will reveal those sources which truly contribute
to the family income. Those that consume much of time and effort but yield little,
can be identified and the energies can be channelized into sources that are truly
productive.
5. Income and expenses listing : when one looks at the abnormally high
expenditure in a period from the Summary Reports and is unable to account for
it, he can generate the listing of those expenses incurred during that period and
this will reveal all the transactions for that period. One can just use his memory
for better things than for remembering the details of all past transactions. And
this can be done perpetually in 'Enrich'.
8. Income summary for a year. Most of us consider only our salary as the
income and hence make all our calculations based on that. But there are
investments say in RBI Bonds that pay interest half-yearly, in Senior Citizen
Scheme that pays interest on a quarterly basis, the rent on your property that
comes on different dates and with reduced amounts sometimes and so on. The
income summary therefore gives a correct picture of your inflows by taking into
account all your various incomes coming in at different points of time.
10. Savings summary for a year. Because of the lack of awareness on both
income and expenses, savings is often a question mark for many people and
they are really clueless about it ! By just entering your income and expenses
transactions n 'Enrich', you will clearly see savings (or the lack of it) for every
month forever. And all these without any counting or use of calculators from your
end and if you have forgotten to put an entry, you can do it and the savings
position will get dynamically altered.
12. Alert when your expenses exceed the Budgeted amount: This is
alarm at its best. While the variance summary can be termed as a post mortem
for future analysis, the Variance Alert happens as soon as the actual expenses
exceed the budget. If the negative happens on the 20th of a month, it is an
indication to the person that some amount of belt tightening must be done in the
next 10 odd days. This helps in reining expenses to a large extent and adds to
the financial stability of the family.
13. Caution when the bank balance is insufficient to meet the cheque
amount. Giving PDCs or Bank mandates for EMIs is very easy but if the
balance in the account is insufficient to meet the payment, then it would all turn
nasty. There would be penalties imposed, charges from the bank for bounced
cheques and can also invite legal hassles. 'Enrich' checks the accounts
(maintained within the software) from which PDCs have been issued 3 days prior
to the due date of realization of the cheque and if the amount is insufficient, it
gives out an alert to the person concerned. An alert and sane person will either
deposit some cash or ask the person concerned to present the cheque a couple
of days later so that he does not face any embarrassing situations.
14.99 All of these for all your Family Members & most importantly, Forever
Simplicity and absolutely user friendly. An excellent software for personal use
Mr Jaganmohan, Chennai
Enrich is so simple but elaborative, user friendly, all in one handy account
`E`book Dr Sankara Venketesan.B, Vallior
Easy to use. No tension. Specially I saved my golden time. Thank you for your
software. Mr.Damodaran, Gudiyatham
It is so easy to work out for a middle class family too Mr. Muthu kumar.M ,
Coimbatore
To Monitor and keep expenses under check Mr. Sundara Natarajan.N Trichy
It is useful maintain our income & expense - Mrs Geetha Ramesh, Chennai
Easy and best. Mr. Shanmugam.V Hosur
Many people think that earning is most important. We differ. We firmly believe
that Savings is more important than earning. History has shown many thousands
of people who earned well, perhaps even extraordinarily but died paupers
because of their extravagance.
We do not want that to happen to you and hence we strongly recommend that
you immediately start following these 2 principles of Recording your incomes and
expenses & Budgeting.
We firmly recommend Enrich Software because of the many benefits that you
can reap from using it regularly.
You can now save money that you would have paid as penalties for late
payment, save time which otherwise would have been spent in searching for
details of your transactions and most importantly gift your entire family Peace
and Prosperity, Forever!
What you pay for Enrich as a Lifetime Fee is probably less than what it would
cost you for an evening out for a movie and dinner with family.
Just pay Rs.995/- & get Enrich Software delivered to your doorstep
3. SMS your order to 8144414433 giving your contact details including your full
address with pin code & email id.
Whether you order online, by email or by SMS, please indicate your Preferred
Payment Option. (Details are given below)
Pre-Paid: Just deposit Rs.995/- (by cash, cheque or fund transfer) into our
Current Account (Indian Bank 807216050 or ICICI Bank 602205040694)
favouring NRich Software P Ltd. We will courier the Software to you at no extra
charge.
Post-Paid or VPP: On receiving your order, we will send Enrich software to you
through India Post and you can pay on delivery to the postman in cash. (There is
an extra fee of Rs.50 to be paid to the Postman for this service)
I have given the essence of prosperity and abundance in this Guide and I really
wish you all success in Saving More, Forever.
Although you now know the Secrets, it would be of no use to you unless you
really start putting these immortal principles to work.
And the first step towards that is to order for Enrich Software. It doesn’t end
there.
The key to success lies in using Enrich regularly, preferably on a daily basis.
And Enrich is to be used not only by you but by all members of your family. Your
Children will learn the basics of money Management and the value of money if
they are asked to maintain their incomes and expenses in Enrich. Your spouse
will now have a real opportunity to use the computers that you have bought for
the home.
If you have any feedback on this Savings Guide or about our products, please
write to me care@nrichsoft.in
V S Badri Narayanan