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Investing for life goals

DOWNLOAD PDF When you travel in a train that is comfortable and will take you to your destination at a good speed. Of these two qualities, which is more important? Being comfortable, or taking you to your destination? It’s an interesting question, and also useful, because the answer will lead the way to something important in personal finance. Suppose the train were comfortable but didn’t go anywhere. It would be clearly useless. Your primary goal would not be satisfied. And yet, if you know that the train will get you to your destination, then comfort also becomes important. So the secondary goal has any value only if the primary goal is met. Doesn’t this sound like something we should all be keeping in mind while planning our personal finance? And yet, many a time, we do not. Sometimes, some of us neglect the basics, like health and term insurance or tax-saving investments. Instead, we first set off on some speculative activity like day trading of stocks or commodities. Or, we forget about retirement savings, and start doing some kind of a consumption activity. When we sit down and think about these issues, it becomes clear that not only do we need to save, not only do we need to invest, but we also need to have a structure and a system by which we can classify and prioritise our financial goals. As you will read in the cover story of the issue, all the financial needs of our lives can be classified in a way that it can help us give them the correct amount of attention, and make the appropriate investments for each.

When you travel in a train that is comfortable and will take you to your destination at a good speed. Of these two qualities, which is more important? Being comfortable, or taking you to your destination? It’s an interesting question, and also useful, because the answer will lead the way to something important in personal finance. Suppose the train were comfortable but didn’t go anywhere. It would be clearly useless. Your primary goal would not be satisfied. And yet, if you know that the train will get you to your destination, then comfort also becomes important. So the secondary goal has any value only if the primary goal is met. Doesn’t this sound like something we should all be keeping in mind while planning our personal finance? And yet, many a time, we do not. Sometimes, some of us neglect the basics, like health and term insurance or tax-saving investments. Instead, we first set off on some speculative activity like day trading of stocks or commodities. Or, we forget about retirement savings, and start doing some kind of a consumption activity. When we sit down and think about these issues, it becomes clear that not only do we need to save, not only do we need to invest, but we also need to have a structure and a system by which we can classify and prioritise our financial goals. As you will read in the cover story of the issue, all the financial needs of our lives can be classified in a way that it can help us give them the correct amount of attention, and make the appropriate investments for each.