Are you an investor who does procrastination investing ? Do you procrastinate often ? For the uninitiated the word procrastinate means to delay or defer an action that you should be doing today. In the investing world, procrastination would imply that you needlessly have pushed out things to the future because you have no sense of urgency of the situation at hand.
The collateral damage of this that you start late in investing and lose the advantage of power of compounding. More on that later. For now, let us check the symptoms of an investor who procrastinates too often.
Signs that you are doing procrastination investing
1. I don’t have the time – This could go down as the favorite reason for not having done the right thing with your money. In my interactions with my clients, this comes out as the most common reason for not having started with the right investing principles. However, the same investor has the time to randomly invest his money in unsuitable products.
Time management is the most basic thing a person should know. All of us have jobs that keep us busy – we work for earning money that feeds the folks back home – it is rather surprising that we cannot take out time to make that same money work for us. I think it it sheer laziness that makes investor say they don’t have the time.
I cannot believe that an investor can find some 2 hours between the months of Jan Feb and March to randomly invest in unwanted and expensive tax saving instruments to save tax but finds himself very busy through the rest of the year to invest in the right products and in the right manner.
Being busy is again a sign of procrastination – that you are putting your investing requirements on a low priority when compared to things that will provide you instant gratification – like say watching your favorite movie for which you will always find the time.
2. I will do it tomorrow – Well, this is such a comfortable thought that it provides for instant gratification today. Pushing out things to the future is washing your hands off the responsibilities you have for today.
The issue with this is that when tomorrow comes, you push out your tasks to another tomorrow. And on and on it goes in a convoluted cycle that tomorrow never comes nor it dies. The end result is that the task at hand never gets completed and you never begin your investments. That is time and money lost.
3. It is very hard – Well, I agree that personal finance is not everyone’s cup of tea. Understanding basic financial planning principles might look very hard and selecting the right products from various investment avenues might be an arduous task, but have you tried at all ? There is so much free information on the Internet that wanting to know a new thing requires just the will to do it.
And if you do not have the time, why not hire the services of a financial planner ? Saying that it is very hard to understand the products and the ways to invest your money is not going to fly. You are following procrastination investing !
4. I don’t like it – You need to first accept the fact that there will never be enough time in your lifetime to do all the things you like. But then there are things that need to be done irrespective of whether you like them or not, simply because those things carry a significant importance in your life. Financial Planing is one of those things so if you don’t like it, you better do something about it.
Do you always like the job the boss gives you ? Do you always like the food your wife makes (stop nodding !) ? We are forced to like things which we might loathe but there comes a time in your life when you have to love those things which you never wanted to. If you keep on saying you don’t like personal finance, you are simply procrastinating !
The side effects of procrastination investing
The knock over affect of procrastination investing is that you rush to do last minute tax savings and buy products that were sold to you. You might have never needed them in the first place. You also simply end up saving your money and parking them in your savings account or fixed deposits where inflation begins to eat away into the meager returns they offer.
Since you are not an informed investor, you skip reading fine prints and sign up documents that are pushed underneath your nose – this is how many investors buy term plans and health insurance polices and fill in the information with junk about their illness history which later lead to rejection of claims.
You rush in to watch television channels for the next tip to make you rich or the next product that gets launched and invest your money into it as soon as it arrives at your doorstep.
You delay things to such an extent that the benefits of starting early are lost and you then need to hurry too fast too late in your life to make up with others.
In short, procrastinating with your investing decision can cost you heavy. It is in your own advantage that you make the right decision today. Find time to do the things with your money and do it today, do not postpone it to tomorrow. Set deadlines !. If you think it is tough for you to understand personal finance topics, then read articles on personal finance for beginners on this website or take mentoring exercises with a financial planner. If you don’t like the subject at all, sorry, you have got to like it a bit and then outsource the rest of it to a financial planner.
If you do all these things right, you will go home happy. Procrastination investing is a demon you need to take control of before it creates havoc in your life.
