When you open the newspaper in the morning, mostly the front page ad will be by some builder luring buyers with a remarkable investment offer that is bound to appreciate in value with unheard levels of return on investments. One question I always wondered about was ‘why don’t these people hold on to their assets instead of selling if the prices are always upwards and skyrocketing’.

Many of the investment opportunities are nothing but spending disguised as investment. Buying a new flat involves taxes, registration, premium, loan fees, interest etc. It is good to buy one to live, but buying solely for investing that too on loans is nothing but a huge spend. We have grown up to see property yielding good returns, but that was largely due to the developments and migrations that happened to some of the cities. Stories of selling inherited houses and making a fortune were told to us which primed us into thinking that buying a property is an investment.

Investment is something that always carries a risk, for example cost of property during 1980s in North Chennai suburbs (like Minjur) and South Chennai suburbs (like Urapakkam) were same, but people who invested in the south reaped the benefits. The risk here was non development, the risk surfaced for some buyers and they ended up just getting inflationary returns. Investment needs knowledge of the market, environment, a bit of knowledge about the economy, a good amount of time and some dose of luck. There is a lesson for investing, do not put all your eggs in one basket but property is such an investment that it is a large egg which sucks up all your savings and locks it up.

Savings does not carry a big risk, but in the long term it definitely erodes away with inflation. Savings can be treated as a low risk investment with a very less return on investment, does not require much market knowledge, it is to cater to short term finance cushion. One should have around 3-6 months of expenses in readily drawable savings, anything more will be eaten by inflation.

What is safe then? Nothing is safe, we need to spend prudently and at the same time invest and save in different baskets to offset the risk of exposure in one area like real estate to the other like stock markets. Don’t succumb to greedy marketing and planned obsolescence, many things last really long.

Baskets for savings (immediate liquidity)

Bank deposits (fixed or savings bank), inflation will eat it over time.

Hard cash and foreign currency, if you travel often. Forex might move with inflation but hard cash will be eaten by inflation from day 1.

Gold, it can be held long as it does not lose too much value but gives less RoI.

Baskets for investments (Risk involved, but always pays over long periods like 15-20 years)

Stocks & mutual funds, equity should be held very long to reap the benefits of compounding and shield from short term market fluctuations.

Plots & farm lands in the fringes of the cities, will take a long time to sell and depends on the development around. If you are lucky could land in a major windfall.

Rental real estate, only if the rental yield is around 7+ % of the cost of the purchase and that too purchased outright without loans.

Spendings

A comfortable house in a locality that brings peace,  when bought on loan; should not burden more than 40-50% of family income as it has a long repayment period. Keep in mind the high costs associated with registration, taxes and fees. Long term returns in the current market conditions pegs flats bought on loan to perform the worst in terms of RoI, treat it as if you are buying a car for yourself not an asset.

A good vehicle, as many people commute a lot. Better to avoid a loan and go for outright purchase which will make people negotiate hard and keep the existing vehicle for long. If you go for a loan then buy only if your outflow is around 20% of your family income and you can finish it off in 2 years.

There are plenty of marketing going on to make us spend a lot more than necessary like changing home appliances every few years, expensive and lifestyle brands etc. Create a budget for spending and try to stay within it as much as possible. Your spending budget per month is best limited as 3 times the rental rate in your area. The rest should be saved and invested.

I was thinking life was getting easier in some areas until I stumbled on a quote that said ‘Life does not get easier, we just grow stronger’. Simple, but a deep thought. If something is getting easy for us, it means there was an external factor that made it easy for us. For example, scientists are working round the clock to find new medicines that makes it easy for us to recover from illness but building an athletic fitness and becoming physically strong requires a lot of work.

Getting stronger always means we have to work towards it, we never get strong without exposure to something that makes us look weak or vulnerable. So when we observe things become easy to us, we just need a pat in the back to ourselves that we have gotten stronger to handle this easily. Being strong is a choice, getting easy things is a matter of someone else making it for us.

‘Surely your are joking My Feynman’ is a biography of Richard Feynman, one of the Nobel prize winning scientists, this book was put together from taped conversations he had with his friend. The book paints a picture that though Feynman is a scientist; he had interests in arts, music, safe cracking and even playing pranks.

He shares his observations about how his art teacher changed the way he thought about teaching. Feynman had always seen the idea of the teacher – giving you the right way to approach a problem, introduce you to standards and tried & tested methods. You will be forced by the teacher to follow a way of doing things until you get it right. Art teachers on the other hand never criticised.

The art teachers always gave feedback like ‘if you use dark lines here, I feel that you want to convey darkness’, ‘if you draw the neck long and the head short, it gives me a feeling that you wanted to show that you are looking through a lens or it is a caricature’. They never prescribed this is how you do, because in art it is possible to use any method to convey what you mean. The teacher was only able to teach through osmosis, there were no instructions or prescriptions. Feynman says that the spirit of how to go about solving problems are taught than the techniques used to solve the problem which is very important.

Recently I got involved with Agile India conference as a volunteer. They have a great guideline of giving feedback to submissions such a way that it is constructive, never in a negative tone and never ever prescriptive. One of the items in the guideline is to see if we can play the perfection game. In this way you are actually trying to improve even when staying away from the implementation itself. There are so many ways to get the same desired result, the solution approach depends on what the individual or team knew at the time of task at hand, the tools at their disposal, their environment and also the mindset .

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It depends