Habits are the basic foundation of a happy life

Hi guys, I hope you are doing good. We could have kept the title “Habits are the basic foundation of success” but decided to go with happiness because we all seek success for living life happily. That being said. This blog is a follow-up on learning as investment 101.  Molding our habits are a powerful tool in our learning journey. Well, learning new things regularly by itself can be a habit.  Let us see what is forming our habits?  Our habits are closely related to how we feel in any given situation.  Say for example

  • Working out makes us feel good, so it help  motivate go to the gym
  • Getting good grades so, it would encourage me to study every day.
  • Thinking of early retirement, so it motivates us to save or invest money
  • For good health so,  it motivates us to wash our hands, doing yoga

well. Often our habits are formed by doing regular practice. For everyday training, we need strong motivation.  And motivations come from achievable goals. So goals are one of the critical factors of building habits.

The grass is not always green on the other side.   Along the way, knowing or unknowing, we tend to pick some bad habits. We don’t want to judge which is a good habit and which is a bad habit. But the good news is we can replace our bad habits with good ones.

There are several technics. The one which I used and found effective was habit sequencing. Which is a simple trick. which can be done with the following steps

  • Write down all the activities you to perform in a day that would help achieve your goals.
  • Then sequence the activities, for example
    1. Wake up at 5:30 AM and get fresh up in 15 minutes
    2. After fresh up will go for walking in pavilion ground for 15 minutes
    3. After walking, on the way home will buy vegies in Reliance fresh

Well, you got the idea, the template is

After some Tasks, I will perform the next Task and in some place.

This kind of sequence helps feed our subconscious mind, and we get habituated to do it every day.

  • The final step is retrospective. It is time to identify the activities which are not contributing towards your goal and replace them with the new one

Habit sequencing also helps create our routines like morning routines, work routines, and before sleep routines.  So the set of activities creates a pattern. Having good habits helps in improving everyday productivity and making us self-disciplined.

Also, another trick that I found helpful in forming habits is self-identity. Self-identity is a powerful tool that helps set our goal setting. If you don’t know what I mean, see your Facebook profile how you are describing yourself?  Well, don’t care much about social media, then that’s even good. Ask yourself some of the hard questions like

  • How should I be seen as a child, as a spouse, and as a grandparent?
  • For professional life, ask yourself how my colleague should see me as?
  • Or just write down how others need to pursue you?

Having a third-person view of ourselves helps in building a strong personality which is one adores. Also helps better earthlings. Do you know? That we can learn to be charismatic.

Here are a few words by Aristotlewhich would surely motivate you to work on habits

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

If you found this blog helpful, please share and like this blog. Also, feel free to leave the comment down below if you need any help on this topic.

Go green is a buzzword no one even cares for

World leadership is talking about reducing the use of fossil fuels because of climate change and the potential damage to the world and can impact each individual directly or indirectly.

We have talked about going green for a decade and not seeing reduction in crude oil production or reducing crude oil consumption. Even though oil helped the economy grow and humanity thrive faster, we are seeing the threat of overusing crude oil which is impacting global warming and rising sea levels. Even though this is a higher threat for island nations, but this issue is global and we should be concerned about it.

In the past few decades, we humans have fallen in love with speed do everything faster to get paid faster. Be it an employee, enterprise, or economy. We would like to grow more quickly even though we have achieved that speed towards growth, but we have not prospered in our journey. We have left behind so much dirt and pollution that hampers the entire ecosystem.  It is time we slow down and look behind what is essential to thrive and prosper.

My friends in India tweeted that beer is finally cheaper than petrol (laugh), so let us stop traveling and start partying.

No wonder the world economy would get impacted by crude oil price fluctuations. And the politics around it. We are here to talk about how we can go green as individuals to make a difference in climate change and rising sea levels.  Even if there is a slight chance it makes a difference, then it is worth trying

  1. We can use walking or cycling for local commutes. We often take out our cars and two wheels just to buy groceries. We can be easily avoided by walking to the nearest grocery shop.
  2. Upgrading our vehicle to electric
  3. Try using public transport for commuting long-distance travel.
  4. Installing solar panels on our rooftops would reduce the dependency on thermal energy.
  5. By growing trees in our neighborhood  or our back yards  would help reduce the carbon footprint

Simple habit change could yield big results and build a better future for ourselves and generations to come.

Why go green?

We can show our care and kindness to save our world and save millions of homes in island nations by going green. Let us use our power wisely and it is time we care for each other before things go out of our hands.

murudeswara beach

Mysuru Dasara 2021 lighting

Mysuru Railway head office

Mysore Dasara is the Nadahabba (state festival) of the state of Karnataka in India. It is a 10-day festival, starting with nine nights called Navaratri and the last day being Vijayadashami. The festival is observed on the tenth day in the Hindu calendar month of Ashvin, which typically falls in the Gregorian months of September and October

The city of Mysuru has a long tradition of celebrating the Dasara festival with grandeur and pomp to mark the celebration. The Dasara festival in Mysuru completed its 411th anniversary in the year 2021,

How to scan for good fundamental stock

Well, it is easy. Use this formula in your stock scanner, and you will get the list of stocks which you can invest on.

eps > 80 AND

Current ratio  > 1.5 AND

Debt to equity  < 20% AND

Interest Coverage Ratio  > 5 AND

 Sales growth 3Years  > 10%

Each of these parameters are big topic by itself, and we will discuss these parameter in great detail. Also let’s find out why we are using these parameter values in our next blog.

You can use this formula, as it is in a stock scanner website like screener.in

I am keeping this blog short so that you can subscribe to our news letter and you don’t miss anything important.

Now it’s time to scan for your next investment.

If you find this blog useful please share with your friends and family!

WHO IS HAPPY?

The Crow, Swan, Parrot or Peacock

Short Moral story of Birds

A crow lived in the forest and was absolutely satisfied in life.

But one day he saw a swan. “This swan is so white,” he thought, “and I am so black. This swan must be the happiest bird in the world.”

He expressed his thoughts to the swan. “Actually,” the swan replied, “I was feeling that I was the happiest bird around until I saw a parrot, which has two colors. I now think the parrot is the happiest bird in creation.” 

The crow then approached the parrot. The parrot explained, “I lived a very happy life until I saw a peacock. I have only two colors, but the peacock has multiple colors.”

The crow then visited a peacock in the zoo and saw that hundreds of people had gathered to see him. After the people had left, the crow approached the peacock.

 “Dear peacock,” the crow said, “you are so beautiful. Every day thousands of people come to see you. When people see me, they immediately shoo me away. I think you are the happiest bird on the planet.”

The peacock replied, “I always thought that I was the most beautiful and happy bird on the planet. But because of my beauty, I am entrapped in this zoo.

I have examined the zoo very carefully, and I have realized that the crow is the only bird not kept in a cage. So for past few days, I have been thinking that if I were a crow, I could happily roam everywhere.”

That’s our problem too. We make unnecessary comparison with others and become sad. We don’t value what God has given us.  This all leads to the vicious cycle of unhappiness.

Learn to be happy in what you have instead of looking at what you don’t have.   There will always be someone who will have more or less than you have. 

Person who is satisfied with what he/she has, is the happiest person in the world.

Here are five reasons, why crypto can be new gold ?

  1. Gold is not easy to store and also not very easy to liquidate into money. We need to have a safe place to keep our gold even if it is too little. Often we store the gold in a bank locker or volt if you have installed one in your home.  On the other hand, cryptocurrency can be store easily in our digital wallet with password protection. Also, it is easy to transact using cryptocurrency. Well, that’s the reason we call it currency. Cryptocurrency has the property of gold. Well, that means the value of the currency will not get depreciated over time.
  2. Transporting gold is often requires security. Well, we do not even need to mention this point. If you remember the last time you wore a piece of costly jewel, how many times would you check if it was fine and in place? Obviously, no one would like to lose their wealth in the middle of the party. On the contrary, cryptocurrency would not attract unwanted people’s eyes to your wealth.
  3. During a natural calamity, would you protect your life or the gold which is there on your volt? Well, crypto would come along with you as long as you remember your password. You can retrieve your wealth anytime, anywhere, as long as there is a receiver.
  4. In case of an economic crisis due to war, inadequate political leadership, or a bad bank, Buying power of actual currency would go down. On the contrary, the gold price would go high; however, who will have that money to buy the gold. Cryptocurrency would have an autonomous economy and would not get influence or impacted by the local economy.
  5. Gold would restrict any individual from travel as they need to come back to where it is stored to liquidate. But crypto gives you the freedom to travel with your wealth and gives you the freedom to liquidate anywhere.
  6. Bonus point gold prices would go down when humans start mining on other planets in the future.

Disclaimer The thoughts expressed in the blog is education purpose only and not finncial advise.

Why is real estate in India not yet ready for investors?

If you are a first-time homebuyer or planning to buy a house for investment in India. There are few things you should be careful about. India has thousands of years of history, and land has moved from person to person, from kingdom to other, and so on. However, we are not here to talk about our Indian history, but to understand some of the problems which have carried forward from the past and still haunting our present. We have moved from a trust-based society to a legal-based society. We are dependent on our law to protect the purchase of our land. However, our Indian law may take several years or decades to resolve the conflicts when things go wrong.  Well, as Investors, we do not risk our money for uncertainty.

Well, I am not challenging the law or judging the effectiveness of how the Law system functioning. But I am worried about how much time and money it would take to resolve the issue if something goes wrong in our real estate investment. Well, it is a topic for another day. Now let me come back to real estate and say why I think real estate investment is not attractive?

Well, India is the seventh-largest country and stands second in world population, that is the fact. However, our Indian real estate growth is still under a dark cloud.  Even though Indian digital growth is outstanding but it seems real estate is left behind on digital transactions.  In real estate, sellers still ask for cash transactions to avoid tax, which gives rise to the black economy, and buyers are impacted. I will talk about this later in this article. Property buyers are not safe in the real estate sector. Here are some of the reasons

  1. Banks in India provide home loans on the individual’s income and credit score of the individual. I am not saying this is wrong. But when buying a house with a home loan from the bank, they don’t provide a loan based on the asset value but provide a loan based on individual income and ability to pay back.  Here asset we are referring to is real estate.  Why don’t banks offer loans based on the house value?  In simple words, the bank doesn’t want to take responsibility for any obligations on the asset they have provided the loan. Even though home buyser lose the house, buyers have to pay back the loan with interest. So banks are not worried about your well-being or the asset. They are only concerned with their money. So take time to laugh at bank advertisements if you see one.  No, wonder why Indian banks have so many non-performing assets.

What happens when you stop paying loans?

  1. Your credit score will get a hit, and you will no longer be eligible for loans from any banks.
  2.  Then your asset will be a pledge and will be out for auction.
  3. The amount which you have paid to the bank he’s gone forever
  4. There is no title insurance in India, Don’t ask me what title insurance is? Yes, many of us in India, Don’t even have insurance to protect our real estate or home. The problem is inadequate records, issues with inheriting ancestral properties, corruption, and illegal land acquisition. I don’t think any companies would come forward to protect retail property buyers anytime soon.
  5. There is no proper town planning and master plans for cities. Or even If there is one, it is being manipulated for an individual’s benefits and gains.

Well, if we keep listing the problems, it keeps growing. Some other reasons it is not a good investment are the imbalance of rental and property value ratio. What do I mean by an imbalance of rental and property value ratio? Every rupee we spend to buy a property returns less than 1% of the property value in retail space. It depends on the locality, connectivity, transport facility, and so on. 

On average, the property value may appreciate around 10%. These are excessive numbers, but there are no actual public records available based on each city or area. If you know how to get this information in India? Then please educate us by commenting below.  The only way to find out the current land price is by asking a local real estate broker.  Even though the grovement entity maintains land price, we have to pay a premium price to purchase real estate. There is a considerable gap between bid and ask price in real estate.

Here are some tips buyers should look into while buying the property

  1. Check if the seller and landowner are the same. You find this in EC.
  2. Check that there is no objection certificate in place for the property you are buying
  3. Check if property tax had paid
  4. Make sure 100% of  the purchase  done via the bank  for bookkeeping
  5. Check if electricity, water bills are paid.
  6. In all records seller’s name should appear.

We will come with another article with complete guides on, how to buy real estate?

Investing in stock market 101

Before you start investing in the stock market, we would like to quote Worn Buffet words

Rule number 1 Never loose money. Rule number 2 Never forget rule number1

To invest in the stock market, you should have a Demat account and a bank account.

If you don’t have a Demat account, you can open it with Zerodha here

Once you have an account opened, you are all set to start your journey in stock market investment.

Investing money for the long term is different from investing money for the short term; both need different skill sets. Like, how to read the companies balance sheet vs. reading the stock daily charts.

We have a variety of options to invest in based on your financial requirements. Let us see one by one

  • IPO (initial public offering) is when any company wants to go public and share its profit with ordinary people or institutions. Here equities will be allocated to stakeholders from the primary market.
  • Equities or securities refer to stocks traded in the secondary market that can be bought or sold through exchange brokers like ABM, Zerodha, or any other stock brokers
  • ETF (exchange-traded fund) trades in secondary markets like stocks, but this is a combination of securities bundled together by AMC companies. For example, Kotak Nifty EFT combined all the shares in the listed Nifty index provided by Kotak. If you are a beginner and want to take less risk, this is the best starting point for all beginners. As ETFs have moderate risks generally.
  • F and O (options and futures).  F and O’s are mainly used to hedging against our investment. These means you use to protect your investment against the volatility of the stock market. However, we should only venture with a proper understanding of the stock market and its underlying mechanism.
  • Commodities trading: here you buy and sell commodities securities through exchange broker like MCX, when we are talking about commodities this is essential commodities like Gold, copper, oil, and many other. Commodity trading can be used as hedging options to protect market volatility.
  • Of course, we have to talk about mutual funds When we talk about the stock market. However, most of us would have invested in mutual funds without knowing where our money would get invested. Mutual funds are manage by fund managers, so-called experts. And we have to pay a fee for managing our funds to AMC company from where you would purchase the mutual fund. We are not great advocates of mutual funds, but if you plan to invest your money here. It is better to invest in index funds or good quality funds.  For mutual fund investment, you do not need a Demat account.

We will deep dive into each of these instruments in our future blogs. These will give you a better understanding of each of these terms or stock instruments. And we are making videos detailing each of the stock instruments.

We want to bring to your notice that is speculating is not equivalent to investing. When you assume, that means you are ready to take some risk. So please make an informed decision.

Talking about speculating, do you think ICO (initial coin offering)is a good investment? Join us in the comment section to discuss

In our next blog, we will talk about real estate and insurance, which are fascinating topics, and we will let you know if it is the right time to invest in real estate?

We thank you for making it so far and sharing your valuable time. And we see you in our following blogs.

Investing our money in Bank

Before investing our money or time in anything, we should understand how fast we can liquidate our money when we need it. Of course, we are investing our money because it can work for us when most needed during our crises or for the new Horizon.

Without further ado, let us dive into the bank as an investment vehicle

Indeed bank gives us more liquidity than most investment vehicles, but it comes with its cost tag.

Bank provides us different accounts as a service. Some of the account types are

  • Saving accounts (which is a high liquidity instrument but give us low return. maybe around 1 to 3%)
  • A recurrent account is a perfect instrument if you are saving your money for your short-term goal). When I say short-term, it is 3 to 12 months.
  • Current account this is mainly used by business and institutes for money transactions.

Bank provides us high liquidity, which means we can withdraw our money whenever needed it. We can start with UPI, ATM cards, Net banking.

Some of these services come with annual charges and minimum balance criteria. Of course, they will charge it because they must pay for infrastructure, employees, CEO, and other things.

So how long would it take to make your money double?

If your bank is paying a simple interest of 3.5% annually and has deposited 1 lakh, it would take 33 years to double your money. Oh, dear, this even called investment?

We will leave it for you to answer that question in the comment section below.

It would help if you always go for compounding interest whenever it is possible. Yes, it is easy to say than done.

So, is there any risk involved in bank deposits?

Yes and no, it depends on which bank you park your money in. We all know Yes-bank, PNB bank issues. But overall, your money is safe in the bank, and you should never walk away from the bank system.

So how much of your money is suggested to park in the bank?

It depends on your immediate money requirement. However, we suggest keeping three months of expense or three months salary. Whichever is higher, this only applies when your health care and life are insured.

We have already talked about insurance in our last article so that you can find it here.

 If you don’t have health insurance for you and your family, it’s better to have at least 12 months of expense or salary reserves in the bank or cash to manage risk.

What future holds for banking?

There is extensive research on “blockchain technology,” a possible alternative way to do money transactions. It is not legal in many countries, but this will be the mainstream of transacting money shortly.

We will do a separate blog about blockchain.

If you like to get started quickly in crypto, you can open an account with Wazirx. We have invested our money, and we feel safe about Wazirx. To get started, click here.

Because of COVID 19, many reserve banks worldwide have cut the interest rate to stimulate the economy. So you expect lesser returns from the bank.

learning as investment 101

A good investor invests in their skill improvement. Yes, building skills is the best investment anyone can make. Many investors lose their money because they don’t build the skills needed to make good decisions.  Yes, that’s the sole reason many folks invest money in their education to join better colleges or universities. But what most of them do not realize is that even with a degree from great colleges, if they don’t make good decisions, they may end up broken.  Most of our life-changing lessons will come from while we are working towards our goals.

I am narrating this story once told by a teacher in corporate training. The story was told like this, once a cargo ship sailing from the US to the UK got stopped in the middle of the ocean, and the captain of the vessel tried starting several times, but it was in vain. Then he calls all the cru members and says whoever starts this engine will get rewards according to their demand.  One gentleman comes forward and says I can do it. And then he took a hammer and hit the machine in different places and starts the engine, and to the captain’s surprise, the engine starts and works seamlessly. And these gentlemen demand 100$, and the captain got shocked at such a hefty price tag during that time. And captain asks these gentlemen, why are you quoting such a high price for such small work? What you did is just hitting the hammer. Gentlemen replies 1$ for hitting the engine from the hammer and 99$ for knowing where to strike on the machine.   Since the captain had promised, he just handover a high price and walks away.  We understand that knowledge is money, so never shy away from learning new skills irrespective of age or gender. Knowledge is the same for all.

We are writing much insightful research on skills required relevant to thrive and prosper in this 21st century. So please don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletters. If you are planning to build the IT profession and want to make good money out of it? Then We recommend you the  Pluralsight. We recommend things that we use and suggest the things which had proven to work for us. So please do check out.  till next time bye