Most important thing in personal finance...

Most important thing in personal finance is knowing your personal habits of expense and saving. For example what is it that i spends most on, movies, outing, dinner etc. Once you know what is it you spend most you can either cut short these or have a cheaper option around it for example if you are movie fanatic may be watch movies in home instead of going to movie hall (At least once in a while to save bucks) and enjoy it.

Also know your savings for example i generally dont like buying clothes somehow i feel its ok to use the existing once till it lasts, its your choice offcourse.

Based on these habits you can come up with best way to plan your savings. And save money to do what u like.

So keep tracking your expenses/spendstrackspends.com

Plan your future by cutting the current expenses...

Excerpt:

Mumbai-based Abhishek Choudhary, 23, a financial services professional, earns around Rs 10 lakh annually, and is planning to pursue an MBA course abroad in the next two years. He has taken a home loan, which entails an EMI of Rs 20,000 and a 15-year repayment tenure. His monthly living expenses, including rent of Rs 11,000, amount to Rs 30,000. He has two regular and one single premium insurance policies.


To plan for above goal in next 2 yrs, Abhishek should reduce his expenses to 10,000 per month.

How to plan it?, by tracking the expenses and cutting down items that are not necessarry. For tracking expenses he started using trackspends.com and has now able to identify his expense target and items to cut-short.

Have a future goal of Higher studies, planning a long break or early retirement, cut your expenses by tracking them....

Here are some of the expert advice on personal finance in ET:

Spend less than you earn: Thinking anything to the contrary seems blasphemous, but try saying this to today’s youngsters. For a start, make an estimate of your monthly expenses, and ensure that you keep a maximum of two months’ expenses in the bank.

Review expenditure heads: There are certain unavoidable expenses such as house rent, school fees, electricity bills. Then there are some which can be controlled like telephone bills, eating out and gifts. One of my clients actually has separate envelopes for eating out, petrol expenses and the like. If the family falls short on an eating-out budget, it goes to a South Indian fast food joint instead of the boutique Italian restaurant.

Now reviewing expenditure heads bring out an interesting point, how do i review my expenditure offcourse we can use credit card and track everything online but these leads to Spending more than you earn, again expert also says that we should use cash in most of transactions that way we have a psychology if cash of 5000 Rs goes we feel something, whereas when we do transaction thru card its looks someone else is paying :) .

So do most of the transations in cash, and track it using trackspends.com

Keep tracking and saving .......

Spending Trends India

Here is an excerpt of spending increase in india:

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SPENDING

In the 80s, snacks included Campa Cola, and the local playboy rode a Yamaha RX100. In the 70s, if you wanted a Bajaj scooter, you went on a waiting list that ran in months, and even years. For many, the dream to own a car came true when Maruti 800 was launched in 1983. 1982 made entertainment more colourful with the launch of colour TV.

In 1970s, the waiting period for a Bajaj scooter after booking, could stretch months or even years.

After the economy opened in 1991, the Indian consumer changed forever. Sensing the change early, Shoppers’ Stop opened its first store in Mumbai in 1991. India saw the smiling faces of KFC and McDonald’s in 1995 and 1996, respectively. In 1999, Crossroads (Mumbai) and Ansal Plaza (Delhi) were the first malls to come up. Another turning point was when Big Bazaar opened in 2001.


Spending for indian consumer is now a graph with increasing trends (up, up, up!!) and the way its going except for few ditches in recession looks like it will never stop.

Even our parents now enjoy :) these malls and shopping experience we have.But the downside is that we always spend more, leading to a debt situation.

One way to do this is track your spends, and i am saying just track it DO NOT do anything just track it for a month, 2 month etc and u will automatically see that it reduces the spends somehow, when we see a consolidated spends for a month, we say oh! that thingy i could have ignored it was just trendy and i only used it once.

This is happening to us (Me and my wife) as we are tracking every expense with trackspends.com .

So why dont u give it a try?

Money saved is money gained....

Why we should to personal finance tracking ? And am one of the worst in it, not tracking any money and not even thinking how, where to spend or where i have spent it. Moreover tracking is pain in neck when u try u put all over sometimes in computer, sometimes in diary, in mobile application, in todo slips blah blah blah. And than consolidating these is way over job which forget it we are too lazy for all that.


So what i have done is sending sms thru mobile and capture ur expenses any where any place any time, and moreover capturing it in website, u dont have to consolidate it its consolidated at one place.

Now what do we gain from tracking our expenses, this is a million dollar questions and lot of people tried/preached and persuaded u should do it and fundas etc.

What i learnt apart from saving some stuff, you have control over money and literally mean control, now u can plan and buy things u always thought will buy with next salary but by the time u are there u are already in debt. Now u can see it and check it based on the proper data.

So lets start tracking our spends/expenses @ www.trackspends.com

Also provide your valuable feedback, comments, fundas .