JagoInvestor.com celebrates its third anniversary

Yet another milestone for Manish Chauhan, founder of JagoInvestor.com.

It’s been three years since Manish started blogging and on Nov 5th 2010, JagoInvestor.com celebrated it’s third anniversary. After three years of run up, JagoInvestor.com boasts of a massive 6500 RSS followers which is still growing and a treasure house of articles where you can find almost anything on personal finance.

On this occasion, here are some snippets of a tete-a-tete I had with Manish on his journey over the last three years and his vision for JagoInvestor.

Which is your best personal finance book and why ?

I have not read any book on personal finance nor I am aware of a pure personal finance book which gives a good idea of everything on personal finance at this point in India. However there is enough material on Internet and loads of good websites and blogs which gives great education on personal finance.

More than knowledge, Personal finance is about attitude and applying common sense in area of personal finance. There are few things which a person has to understand and on top of it he himself can build all the knowledge and analyze things .

What is your vision for JagoInvestor in the next 5 to 10 years ?

Personal Finance is a huge area with opportunity. I see JagoInvestor being synonymous with “Financial Literacy” and “Psychology changing website” which along with providing personal finance knowledge also provides counseling in the area of personal finance, I want to build a program which would span over months or may be 1-2 yrs which if a person joins it can totally transform his way of looking at personal finance and it can turn a novice into a pro in area of personal finance.

Overall JagoInvestor’s main motto is to change investors relationship with money over time.

You come from a different background than personal finance – how did you manage this over and above your day job ?

There is Chinese proverb, “start doing what you truly love and you will never have to do any work !”. Common sense has no background and I consider personal finance as pure common sense fueled with a passion to change one’s financial life.

As I like number crunching and I consider myself a logical person, I started a blog one fine day without realizing that it would become this big today, readers liked it and it was making difference in their life, which motivated me to work hard and make sure I keep running this movement of financial freedom.

What would be your top three advices for investors ?

Top 3 advices I can suggest some one is

– Start investing time to understand how important personal finance is in one’s life, thats one thing we work for and our quality of life depends on.
– Take pain of cross-checking each and every aspect promised by products, like investors in endowment plans should calculate what is the return they are getting and how 1% more return can impact their wealth in long run.
– Shift from free advice to paid services and value them, paid does not mean costly, if you get more value than what you pay, thats even cheaper than FREE. This mind set of getting FREE FREE FREE in each and every aspect of life actually turns out to be very costly in long run.

What are top 3 urgent changes India needs in the personal finance space ?

a) Shift from sales driven attitude to value-based model in selling : When even you get a call about some product, all you hear is how great the product is, how much return it gives and blah blah .. all the focus is on the sales and even the conversation you hear is driven by sales. The biggest change which should happen is the whole model should be based on how the product will help customers in achieving their goals, a client buys a product because it helps them in life, not because its GREAT.

b) Training to agents and IFA’s : There is good number of magazines/portal for investors to help them in taking informed decisions,  however I don’t see anything which helps agents and other IFA’s/CFP’s to understand how they should change their strategy in acquiring clients and giving value service to them. We need some services like these.

c) Basic Financial Planning for each Indian : While financial planning is a detailed thing in general, each person should have access to cheap basic planning for their life goals such as child education and retirement at least. There has to be a model which gives them inexpensive plan for their most basic goals in life.

(As told to TheWealthWisher)

Here’s wishing Manish all the best for his future endeavors.