“𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐈 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲?”

Almost everyone who turns up for our Financial Independence mentoring session asks this question.

And the simple answer is: “𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞.”

🚫 Park the FIRE corpus calculations.
✅ Do not put pressure on yourself to land this number if you don’t know your expenses.

💡 𝟗𝟓% (and I’m not exaggerating) of our mentees didn’t know their yearly expenses. It’s usually just a hypothetical number!

Even Ranjani Mani and I made this mistake during our early years of planning. We used estimated numbers to work out our corpus, but over time we realized those numbers weren’t adding up.

We tried all sorts of fancy apps that read our SMS and categorized our expenses, but finally, we went back to the simplest way of bookkeeping—𝒂 𝑮𝒐𝒐𝒈𝒍𝒆 𝑺𝒉𝒆𝒆𝒕.

📊 Every day, we capture all our expenses—whether through credit card, UPI, or cash—in this sheet. To streamline family expenses, we created a simple 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕𝒔𝑨𝒑𝒑 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒑 where anyone who spends drops a note with the amount and a brief description.

🌟 And what a world of change it made! We were astonished to find that we had been underestimating our expenses by 15-20% every year.

This simple exercise also gave us the opportunity to reflect on areas where we were overspending and explore ways to optimize them. We’re so used to it now that even a small spend of ₹20 goes into the sheet.

𝐌𝐲 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞:
Start with this simple exercise. Do it for 6 𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒉𝒔 and you’ll start getting a clearer picture of your spending. If you do it consistently, like us, for years—you’ll gain confidence in your spending patterns and know exactly what you need.

Remember: 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥, so invest the time to figure out the right one for your family.

Trust me, this exercise won’t even take 10 minutes a day. ⏳