Tag Archives: Personal Finance

Telling v/s Showing

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The target audience for this post is me alone. This is to record my thoughts about being a better blogger. So it’s okay for you to skip this one.

I have come to understand the futility of “telling” something to readers. It sounds preachy. Good in theory, but ain’t practical.

Like the one I read on a billboard today: “Let us strive to make tomorrow better than today”.

Does it make an impact on you and me? Not really, because it’s “telling” me to do something rather than “showing” me what to do!

“Telling” is like saying: “Take my advice. I don’t use it anyway”.

I think there can be a better way. Instead of the preachy “do’s” & “don’ts” of personal finance, there could be a way to “show” the way to manage your money.

How? That’s a million dollar question that I have to struggle with.

Example: Instead of talking about the benefits of budgeting (theory and preachy part), I can show you the “Personal Finance Tracker”. See this screen shot below:

Personal Finance Tracker: Budget Chart

Personal Finance Tracker: Budget Chart

Hey, I told you this post is for me trying to show myself to write better. Now that you’ve come thus far, let me know if you think I’m on the right track.

Thanks! I promise I’ll get better and better :)

Btw, if you want to try out the tracker application, you can download it for free from Zoho Creator’s Marketplace. It’s featured right on the top!!

Coming Soon! RupeeCamp "Financial Planning Workshop". "Join us"

Welcome back! Join me on this journey to improving our financial IQ and sharing what we know. Updates at RSS feed or Email. And spread the word please Thank You!

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Personal Finance Tracker

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Technology excites me with the way it helps us to do something in a better way. Technology fascinates me when it solves problems, big or small.

So, perhaps, this fascination has helped me build the following tracker application. I do not have any technical qualifications and it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. But as they say learning never stops and if you’re keyed on to something, you figure out how to handle it.

Zoho Creator has featured the application on their marketplace and that has given me the courage to write it on my own blog. And also the 400+ downloads along with encouraging comments about the clean and simple interface.

To manage anything, it is recommended that you measure it first. So when we talk about personal finance, the “Do’s” & “Don’ts” do not really register with most of us. The key is to “Get started” on managing your money.

So if you and I are serious about personal finance, there should be a way to track what is happening to this important resource.

Personal Finance Tracker is an easy and simple way to track your personal finance. You can measure and track  your income and expenses, create your portfolio of your Investments, create alerts/reminders and go to your choicest financial calculators.

Personal Finance Tracker on Zoho Creator

Personal Finance Tracker on Zoho Creator

You can also see pictorial representations of your budget, investments and expenses. You can filter them for what you need to analyse.

Expense Chart

Expense Chart

You can further filter the chart on the basis of the category of expense, whom spent for, payment method, etc.

Similarly for the income chart, you can filter it out on the basis of various sources of income. You can see a pie chart for your budget categories as well as your expenses.

There’s calendar view of your alerts and reminders too.

Personal Finance Tracker: Calendar for Alerts

Personal Finance Tracker: Calendar for Alerts

You can filter the calendar on the high, medium or low criticality of the alerts and the months of the alerts too.

And btw, if you think that only a techie/programmer can build all this, let me confirm that it’s been done by me alone. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing Zoho Creator. It’s really friendly and intuitive and you can build a complete web application even when you are not a techie. Even techies can use the interface to build more complex applications, I’m sure.

Do try out the Free install of Personal Finance Tracker at Zoho’s Marketplace . Let me know what you think

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Personal Finance for HR Guys

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The HR guy sitting next to me complained, “I do not understand money. Can you help me?”

Treat money just like you treat people in your daily HR job, I replied. That’s the genesis of this post. Let me elaborate.

My understanding of the job of an HR guy is that it entails the following four elements. 1. Role description 2. Recruitment & Selection 3. Performance Appraisal and 4. Training & Development.

Role Description: It is important for the HR guys to articulate the role for each employee. This role has to be aligned to the Organization goals and objectives.

Same goes for your money. You need to identify your own financial goals first. And then go on to assign various roles for your income as well as expenses.

Recruitment & Selection: Once the HR guys know what kind of roles are required to be performed, he plans out the selection of people to man those roles.

So when you have articulated your financial goals, you are ready to select your investments. You need to evaluate the options available and make the choices

Performance Appraisal: This is really the limelight season for HR guys. You need to document the key performance indicators and metrics and evaluate performance of your people.

With money, this is like the budgeting exercise. You analyze your networth and the balance sheets for your income as well as expenses. Build your own dashboard which tracks your income, expenses, investments and liabilities.(personal finance tracker)

As with performance appraisal exercise, you don’t really need to check up with daily stock prices. Maybe a half yearly review would be right. After all you need to trust people and your own selection process.

Training & Development: As with people, you need to continuously refresh your money resource. Enroll for a programme on personal finance. Read a book on managing your money. Money is as dynamic (if not more!) as your people.

The point I want to make is that principles of managing anything can be applied to your money too. The other point I always stress on is that it’s not rocket science and in fact it’s just plain common sense. The key is to get started.

Go, schedule an Assessment & Development Centre (used by HR Consultants to assess & develop competencies required to perform roles) for your money management

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