Article

Are you running after money?

Are you running after clients to do business and collect payments?

Then you are running after money.

Most of the time when I ask the 1st question, the direct answer will be “No, I am not running after money”.

When I decode and ask the second question, then everyone will understand the difficulties of generating business and money.

There is nothing wrong in stating that I am after money, but do you want to make that money to run after you.

I am going to share an interesting process called “Separate to Grow” for every Entrepreneur. This will lead to “Growing your Money”.

What should be your first step?

As a business owner, you should focus on business to grow your business. This is going to be the primary source of income for you and your family. I have interacted with 100s of business owners and all of them had the same problem of not being able to save anything from their business.

Separate your business income from your personal income. Some of you may be operating as solopreneur but still both these incomes should be maintained separate.

Problems of considering business and personal income as one income:

1. No clarity on how the business is progressing
2. No clarity on how much personal expense is increasing every year
3. You cannot define marketing expenses for business and your business may not grow as well
4. Not able to have an employee, considering it as an expense
5. Debts will become part of your life and growth will be stalled. 

You shall just to do one thing to have a separate business and personal income. It just doesn’t stop with having a separate bank account alone, but you need to use both of them for the purpose. Use business account only for your business-related activities and personal account for your family needs and desires. School/college fees, groceries, outing, festival celebrations etc. should happen from this savings account only.

Benefits of having separate Business and Personal Accounts:

1. Your Family needs and desires will be clear
2. You can chart your business plan and work on it
3. No confusion with accounting in business
4. No confusion while filing taxes for personal and business accounts

Now you have progressed up to the first step!

How to Grow your Money?

Now you know your monthly personal income, and this is the time you can start working on growing your money. Most of the time you want to start saving and investing but you may not be able to because of no surplus. The biggest myth you need to understand is, you don’t need excess money to grow. You need to follow savings as the first thing to do every month irrespective of your income.

When you don’t save, you end up doing things on ad hoc basis. You may get emergency and you start using the money from the account or start using credit cards or get into debts.

Expenses had increased and things which were once desires for many had become the need and necessity. You end up focusing on lifestyle as the first step without seeing the need to save. At this stage, insurance or investment looks secondary and out of focus.

Now you need to know the money leaks which is happening in your life. Unless you arrest these money leaks, it is difficult to grow your money.

To arrest your money leaks, you need to follow things in below order:

1. Savings
2. Insurance
3. Investment
4. Debts
5. Lifestyle

Most of them focus on lifestyle because of which debts will come into their lives and rest of the things become impossible. So, follow this order to arrest money leaks, as in each of these areas there are numerous ways where you lose money.

Savings

Now you have one savings account to receive your income. You should also have one more account to use it for accumulating emergency fund, investing and insurance needs.

Your emergency fund should be around 8-10 months of your monthly expense. Say your monthly expense is 50,000 then your emergency fund should be nothing less than 4-5 lakhs. By this way your risk is taken care of. Most of the time I have received question on, “Can I withdraw funds from the investments in case of emergency?”

My simple point is to maintain an emergency corpus and all your problems and risk is taken care of. If you don’t save this emergency fund, you lose money in one way or the other which is one form of money leaks i.e. saving leaks.

Insurance

You may make big plans and get big debts to expand your business. If anything happens to you then it is not just the plans along which fails, it is the debts which will fall on the heads of your family.

If you had taken Term Insurance to protect your family financially, then they may be protected. This will help to close the loans and take care of the studies of your children immediately. This amount may provide breathing space to recoup and continue the business also.

You may not get the amount you paid in this Term insurance, consider it as an AMC – Annual Maintenance Contract which you take for your household products.

What if you are not dying and still lose money? It can happen if you lose money due to hospitalization. Take a health insurance for yourself and for your family. This will help to protect your family from losing the invested money all of a sudden. Take sufficient coverage considering the city you are living in as the cost of treatment will be different.

When you take these two insurances, your risk is taken care of. Hence these coverages are called as risk coverage. Don’t expect returns from these Insurance coverages. If you do that, it is one of the money leaks i.e., Insurance leak.

Investments

Next step in the process to grow your money is investing. Your money should grow more than the inflation rate, so that you accumulate more. Inflation rate in India for the last 40 years have been around 7%. Our deposit rates have stayed in double digits or around 9% and it had come down drastically to around 5% in the last 10 years.

Fixed deposit has been a good investment tool along with Insurance policies but now, these don’t even beat inflation. Also, the expenses had shot up in the last 10-15 years ever since the mobile usage had started increasing.

“Once a Need has become the necessity now”

So, you need to start saving something definitely, only then you can invest. This will help you to achieve all your future financial goals and may also help to lead a good lifestyle.

You need to start investing in financial asset rather than physical asset like Gold and real estate alone.

Among financial assets, you can consider Equity investing and it can be through Mutual funds or direct stock market.

Among asset classes, equity as an asset class has generated highest returns across the world and in India. Gold, Real Estate, Fixed Deposits, Post Office, Life Insurance Policies etc. have generated single digit returns or close to 10% only.

Equity has generated around 15% returns in the last 40 years. There may be difficulty in identifying stocks and investing on your own, hence mutual fund is one of the easy ways to invest in equity. Risk is distributed in the case of mutual funds as the investment amount is distributed among many stocks or companies.

In Mutual Fund, even if inflation is eating up 7%, you are going to make a minimum of additional 8% in equities. UTI Asset Management Company is one of the oldest fund houses in India and their first fund is still operational i.e., UTI Master share scheme since 1986. This fund has generated 16.15% returns in this period. If you had started with 500Rs and continued till date, you would have ended up having close to 75 lakhs.

Another big advantage of this mutual funds is that you can invest according to your financial goals. Say you want to invest for your child education, which is 10 years from now, then you can withdraw the fund around that time. Though it is mutual fund you can choose to invest in equities or debt or hybrid categories. 

Debts

Your home is a liability, and it is not an asset. This can be the shocking truth for you. Many entrepreneurs after setting up the business they focus upon new home considering it as an asset. As you will start paying up EMIs initially and later there is no cash flow out of your home, it cannot be considered as an asset class. 

Even if it is a rental income, it cannot be more than 4% across India as per the survey carried out by moneycontrol website.

Another way you end up in debt trap, is by getting personal loan or using credit card. When I asked about the interest rate of credit card in my facebook community called “Unlimited Wealth”, almost everyone had said it may be around 15 - 20%. Interest rate of credit is one of the highest and it is from 36-60%. Depending upon the card you use and if you become default by not paying the due amount on time, it keeps increasing.

Focus on increasing your asset at any point of time in your life, you end up being one of the wealthiest and happiest persons. If you think emotionally like others and increase your liability, then you will bereave like everyone else. 

Lifestyle

Lifestyle has become a necessity due to hectic lifestyle. Once washing machine, AC, and Big TV were considered as lifestyle products and now it has become needed ones to live the life normally.

Have you ever considered the cost of changing these products once in 3-5 years?

Right from mobiles, washing machine, furniture, AC, TV, Bike, car etc., is available in most of your home or you may wish to buy quickly as the business takes off.

Almost everyone may focus on these things but to lead a sustainable lifestyle which will stay forever you need to start from the beginning i.e., savings, else your lifestyle is the biggest leak which you may find difficult to arrest in your lifetime.

Steps to Grow your Money:

1. Have a separate bank account for personal savings and business income
2. Use 2 personal savings account – one for family expenses, other for investing and Insurance
3. Arrest money leaks in your life - it can be in Savings, Insurance, Investment, Debts and Lifestyle
4. Focus on increasing your income and invest according to your financial goals
5. Choose the right investment products which can help in achieving all your financial goals

You can keep complaining about being an entrepreneur or simply correct the way you operate money in your life.

You will get financial freedom eventually if you can follow the above steps in order.

So now, Will you grow your Money?

About the Author

Ganesan Thiru is an Author, Stock Market Profit coach, Research Analyst who has trained more than 10,000+ people in stock market investments & had done 90+ webinars in the last 15+ months He has 1800+ people in his Private Facebook group “Unlimited Wealth” & active in social media. His mission is to inspire one million people in getting financial freedom.