SIPs can solve the ‘Save’ or ‘Spend’ Dilemma

I am a person of quotes and love to use them in my daily life as well as share them amongst friends. One interesting quote which I came across was:

I’m stuck between ‘I need to save money’ and ‘You only live once’.

Well, this specific quote elicited a lot of response and everyone was looking to me for answers to the same.

Now that has put me in a conundrum. Being an investment advisor, what is the advice which I would firstly follow myself and what would I recommend that  investors should do?

I’m making a small attempt here to try to give some logic to this dilemma.

This is what I would do and you may have a different perspective.

We are now in an age where there are plethora of spending options before us. With changes in technology and new inventions, there is a lot of new stuff available which, frankly, was not there  20 years back. So savings were robust by default, as avenues to spend were very few. No malls; no new models of cars or smartphones; no multiplexes or cafes nor were there fancy pubs and restaurants around every nook and corner. Moreover, the luxuries of the past have become necessities of today and as a consequence, our spending has increased and savings have automatically gone down.

In the current new age, therefore, we need to change our saving and spending habit; from our income, we should first save and then spend. This habit will help us to be prudent in our spending as well as have a safety net for our future. The quantum of saving is for you to decide but keep it at a value which is neither too small nor too large where you feel a pinch.

A friend of mine from the investment community, Amit Trivedi, very aptly stated, “Life is a struggle between 2 movies ‘Tara Rum Pum’ and ‘Zindagi na milegi Dobara’!”

Investing, and especially through SIPs, will not only help you to build a corpus for the future as it harnesses the power of compounding, making your money work for you. At the same time it will allow you to enjoy your life at present as the investment amount does not impact your current income substantially.  So Live Life King Size!