Personal finance management should be a priority, not an afterthought: Sharan Hedge

According to financial influencer Sharan Hegde, managing personal finances and asset allocation is as important as upskilling and increasing the primary income.

At TechSparks 2024 Mumbai, India's most influential startup-tech summit, he emphasised that young professionals should pay attention to the money that's lying in their bank accounts.

“It is very sad to see how little attention people give to the money that is sitting in their bank account after they put in so many hours to make that money. So much of time goes into upskilling yourself, getting that MBA degree, [and] getting that high salary, but not even a fraction of that time goes towards allocating that money in the right places,” he said in a fireside chat.

He further added that people should develop a habit of tracking their financial assets ranging from their bank accounts, fixed deposits, or public market investments every month, and should also have clarity on long-term plans regarding their retirement corpus and inheritance.

Hegde, who’s also the Founder and CEO of financial education startup The 1% Club, also discussed the dynamic landscape of financial planning.

Speaking on FIRE (financial independence, retire early), he stated that the concept is quite misunderstood in India and needs revisiting on a fundamental basis. “I think a lot of people are misunderstanding it by thinking they’ve saved a certain amount of money and now they can just chill and watch Netflix all day. That's not the answer.”

He elucidated the concept of post-FIRE, according to which individuals should focus on aggressively saving enough investment corpus by their mid-30s or early 40s which should be invested in relatively risk-averse asset classes so they don't have to work for money in their sixties.

“But unlike FIRE, you don't stop working [after saving the corpus], you'll still make enough money to take care of your day-to-day expenses. But you still keep aside enough money from your 40s itself so that one day when you're 60 that money is going to take care of you,” he explained.

Hegde, better known online as Finance With Sharan, has 2.5 million followers on Instagram, over 2.7 million subscribers on YouTube, and nearly 315,000 followers on LinkedIn.

In October last year, a clutch of investors including Zerodha Co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s venture fund Gruhan and Abhijeet Pai from the Puzzolana Group had invested Rs 10 crore in Hedge’s venture in its pre-Series A round.