FINANCE/BUSINESS
NEVER SAY LATER!
By Ravi Garg
Thirty-seven-years-old Marie works in a digital design company, earning a steady monthly salary and is one of the most sincere people I have met with and discussed financial freedom.
When she first came to me, she said something I have been hearing from hundreds financially distraught families. “I always knew I should start investing methodically. I just kept telling myself I will do it next month.” The one word, ‘later’, had silently cost her close to twelve years anguish.
Marie was not careless. She was not a spendthrift. She read the financial articles, bookmarked the videos, even opened an investment account once and then never put money in it. Every January, she promised herself this was the year! Every December, she was in the same place. The shocking part is that she genuinely believed she was being responsible by waiting. Complacently trying to ‘understanding’ the markets to invest in fully. Mostly waiting for a salary bonus trickle; waiting for the markets to feel safe. She kept waiting for her life to settle down.
Here is the hard truth I had to share with her, and I want to share it with you too, because I am concerned about the number of families stuck exactly here. Procrastination with money is not laziness, let that be clear. It is almost never laziness. It is fear wearing a calm face. It is the quiet panic of not knowing where to begin, so we choose to begin nowhere. We tell ourselves we are being patient when really we are just scared, and scared is human. I have been there myself… money does not care about our reasons. Money only listens to time.
Let me show you what those 12-years did. If Marie had simply put aside even a small amount each month from her 15 years, that money would have had more than a decade to grow on itself. The first few years would feel like nothing. The magic is all in the back end, when your money starts earning more than you put in. By delaying, Marie did not lose 12 years of savings. She lost the most powerful 12 years - the years that were supposed to do the heavy lifting later in life. You cannot buy those years back at any price. That is the cruel part. A man with money can recover from many mistakes, but no one can recover lost time.
When Marie understood this, she did what most of us do. She panicked the other way. She wanted to fix everything at once. She wanted to start five investments, cut all expenses, plan retirement, clear off petty loans, all by next week. And I stopped her because that is procrastination’s twin brother. When a task feels too big, we freeze again.
So we used something I keep coming back to with every family I work with. I call it the Rule of One. Forget the ten things you think you should do. Pick one. A single action that you cannot talk yourself out of. For Marie, it was one automatic monthly investments of a modest amount, set up on salary day, so she never had to decide again. That was it. No grand plan. No spreadsheet with forty rows. One decision made once, that kept working on its own.
Something moved in her after that. The fear that had frozen her for over 10-years lost its grip, because she was finally moving. One became two. Two became a habit. Within a year, she was doing more than she ever thought she could, not because she became disciplined overnight, but because she stopped waiting to feel ready. Readiness, I have learnt, comes after you start, never before.
I am writing this as there is a very good chance someone you love keeps saying ‘next month’. The parents wanting to start investment for children postpone the needed paperwork. The couple that keeps postponing financial decisions on some pretext….
If that is you, I am not going to ask you to do ten things. I am asking you to do just one today. The smallest possible step you cannot back out of. Open a bank account. Start the one investment. Have the one honest conversation about your money tonight at the dinner table. The most expensive words in any family’s budget are not EMIs or ‘tax’ or ‘loss.’
The blasphemous word is LATER! It has a tendency of evolving to never.
