Adrak Elaichi Chai aur Finance

Smita Shetty

Chartered Accountant (CA);  FINANSYS

LinkedIn;Beyond Boardrooms by Smita Shetty

---

Every January, my husband and I block one evening on the calendar -

no phones, no spreadsheets at first, just two cups of chai and one honest question -

Do we still feel financially secure the way we did last year?

Because numbers alone don’t answer that.

Lot of my folks look as Insurance as either investment or expense.

For us, it’s a mitigation plan, when done first and right, it absorbs life’s shocks quietly and there’s an unexpected side effect to it, it allows us to maintain a more efficient emergency fund, while letting the rest of our money work with purpose instead of sitting still out of fear.

Only after that do we look at our investments. This year, allocation took longer than usual, with global tensions, changing market ratios, and uneven performance across segments, we felt the need to reassess our mix.

Small and mid-caps had underperformed for a while, so we used the opportunity to book partial profits in silver to help with tax planning, ofcourse with the intention to re-enter at a more appropriate time.

Then came a moment of pause.

On paper, we held several mutual funds tagged against goals.

But when we looked under the hood, many of them owned the same companies - different fund names but same exposure.

We also checked whether fund managers had recently changed, whether strategies had drifted, and whether diversification was real  or just assumed.

Retirement planning followed, not because it’s imminent, but because assumptions age faster than we realise.

Instead of fixating on a single corpus number, we talked about how life might actually look.

Some expenses will rise, others will naturally fall away.

Next, we pulled up our parents’ SWPs. The intention wasn’t return optimisation but just to make sure the income still feels comfortable for their current lifestyle.

A small check, but one that mattered.

Nothing dramatic changed that evening, but we did gain clarity.

Over the years, I’ve learnt that good financial planning isn’t about predicting the future perfectly.

It’s about building discipline, creating room to adapt, and reducing the mental load money often brings - so money supports life decisions, instead of limiting them.

For families who’d like their financial plan reviewed with this same lens of clarity and practicality, we’re always open to a conversation