Making the right financial decisions in your 20s

A lot of us learn about financial responsibilities later in life. But, at Skcript we wanted to make sure every individual makes smart economic decisions. Hence was born TwoCents, our monthly session on money management.

It is essential for an individual to be aware of the financial decisions he/she makes. When the pandemic hit, I made a personal choice to manage my finances better and make more economic choices. When it comes to money, it is never too late to start and I wanted to make sure my team was educated in this process too.

Rather than reading articles, watching videos or listening to speakers to help in this journey, I sought help from the people I work with everyday. Everyone has different perspectives, experiences and what’s better than sharing knowledge gained from real life experiences! It’s also much more relevant to all of us.

That’s how TwoCents was born. Every week I get the team involved in some internal activity and TwoCents was now added to that activity list with one session a month. So far we have completed 5 sessions each covering an essential part of finance.

The first session of Two Cents had Swaathi to start with the basics. ‘Make your money work for you’, a suitable topic!

The first step to managing our finances is to know what income is and plan how to spend it. Swaathi gave a brilliant talk on covering the basics of money management and helping people identify when to save for what; a roadmap of personal finance.

Sneak peak of Make Your Money Work For You

Our second session was on investments. Varun had secretly become a passionate investor once the pandemic began. His session on ‘Investments 101’ was very useful and helped people identify what sort of investments to go for especially when you are just starting it. Following his session I was able to educate myself in terms of the stock market and make minor investments to start with!

Bonus session. To take a break from the two big sessions I decided to run a mini session on simple RD and FD investments an individual could make. I gave a quick walkthrough of how to utilize the different deposit formats to their benefits.

The third session was on consumerism. Unlike the other sessions, this was purely a reflection of Praveen’s choice of financial living. The title to this session was ‘Philosophy of Consumerism - Featuring Memes’ and apt to its title Praveen conducted the session scrolling through chosen memes. The objective of this session was to teach about the life of Diogenes and how he lived an extremely simple life and died in contentment. The learning here was to control our wants and not subject ourselves to consumerism.

Sneak peak into Philosophy of Consumerism - Featuring Memes

Next was a session on credit cards. Credit cards are feared by many humans because of the horrific stories where people failed to manage it well. I wanted to break these myths and properly educate everyone about how a credit works and how to ensure we don’t go overboard. Dikson, has a commendable knowledge on this subject and helped me put together a session.

Sneak peak into Credit Card 101

And to our recent talk; ‘Have You Filed Your Tax?’. Filing tax or even understanding how taxes in India work itself is not so easy. This was just a kick start session to help people understand what and how taxes work. Savitha, who has been educating herself in this and is trained enough to file her own taxes will be holding one more session on the same topic. Her information of tax slabs, declarations and claiming tax was helpful to a lot of us.

Though everyone might not put these information to use, it is always good to be aware of these things. If we don’t have a hold of our own finances how can we trust a third party to do it for us?

Now that you have learnt about Two Cents at Skcript, if you want to introduce something similar in your team reach out to us for help or share with us your experience. Maybe we can bring in some external speakers to share their real life experiences too!

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