New year resolutions – 2017

New Year Resolutions

Last year I first published a list of my top 10 new year resolutions for the year of 2016. So I’m continuing the tradition, cause it helped me move in the right direction in the last year throughout. I would go back each month to this resolution list and see my progress. It was a fun and productive process.

It’s the new year day today. New hopes, New resolutions and a report of last year’s resolutions. Here you go.

New year resolutions – 2017

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How this amazing medium helped me read more than 9 hours a week?

Recently I’ve found interest in an old school medium of book and article reading, even though its old but still got its charm. It literally helped me gain more knowledge than ever before in past sometime.

This medium is Audio! by the mean of Audio books & Podcast.

How it can benefit?

While commuting or going for a run, earlier I used to listen to all types of music. But recently after reading an article from a guy who works at buffer. He shared amazing routine of his where he listens to audio books and podcasts while running or commuting. Here is a brief of the reasoning he gave.

“Often we use to put aside less time for reading articles or books than we would want due to busy life. But guess what! its not that we have less time, its how we make best of our time.”

His words gave me a reason to stop and reflect on my daily routine. Lately I’ve started 3 new books and have put many articles in my read it later app. But yet I’ve not made any significant progress in that front. Not because I’m too lazy, but because my day job and workout routine  leave me rarely any time for reading books and articles. So I tried to think, where can I cut some slack and add myself some reading time? That’s where the power of this audio medium crossed my mind.

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How these 3 things will change your life forever.

Building a good habit or cutting out a bad habit is not that easy. As we grow up, we start to change, cause life happens. Things which we used to like few years back, might not interest us now. Vice-verse, things which we didn’t like a few years back, we might start liking.

We as humans are prone to change in ourselves. More over, the age and time demands change as well. But sometimes a single incident can change your life forever. I’ll tell you a story about that.

“In mid 50’s, there was a lower middle class couple living in a small town in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.  They were living a frugal life. They had a girl named ‘Shanti’ as their only child.

Shanti who couldn’t get too much in her childhood in comparison of any other child of a middle class family kid in that time. But still she was a happy child. She would run behind the sheep, the shepherd will shout at her in joy as she was a cute little freak.

As she grew up she got habituated of treating the animals badly. She would throw stones at the street dogs, kick the sheep or abuse any of the sort of animals. Her parents who thought they were giving her great cultural values didn’t know about this bad habit of her.

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How long does it take to save a month’s worth of expenses as your emergency fund?

I was reading through my daily reading list today and I came across some good articles which really helped me learn something on how to save emergency funds. It really came out to me as an eye opener!

Every finance advisor today advises us that we should keep aside three to six months’ worth of expenses for emergency. But very less number of people end up saving that kind of emergency fund.



What’s the reason that rest of the people couldn’t do it?

Answer is very simple to this question, cause they save very less. Suppose you are saving just 5% of money from your whole income, that means you are spending 95% of your money in your expenses. So we’ll check how much time it actually takes to save only one month’s emergency fund.
By a simple formula, which I got from an article:



So you’ll be able to save a single month’s worth expense in 95/5 = 19 Months!  Yes More than a year and a half for just a single month’s worth of emergency fund.

That’s a bad news, obviously. But there is a flip side to this situation. If we just increase our monthly saving to 10% the time needed to save the money for a month comes down drastically to 9 Months only. An exponential drop! Just Imagine, you saved 50% for 2 months so you’ll be able to get that 1 month’s emergency fund in just 2 Months!!

So the bottom line is we need to save money a little more than we usually do, if we want to save some good amount of emergency funds. How to seriously save money, you can get some help on that here. Rob Berger (doughroller.net) has explained it very well.

Here’s another link for a great article I found in Morning Star’s yesterday’s newsletter, 5 Steps to Build an Emergency Fund. Great Article.


Hope you enjoy today’s post and start saving more towards a great emergency fund goal! Good luck.
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