Charity Begins At Home

 

The year was 2010 when I had passed out my CFP and had transitioned my decade-old career in Hospitality and Automobiles to the new world of assisting families in redesigning their personal finance. From the very beginning was always of the belief that our own skin should be in the game. As a Financial Planner started my own & some family members SIP, Got optimum Term Life and Health Insurance Coverage.

The roots of two old adages “providing the best to our clients & clients interest first” go long back to satisfactorily running our joint family business of an eating house which is a century old, the first Thali was always and till date is still consumed by one of our family members to ensure the consistency in quality, taste and method of service.

In the same way I wanted all our client investors at Ghalla Bhansali and team to feel that we do truthfully walk the talk.

In the heydays, one fact I quickly realised that Comprehensive Financial Planning was an ideal thing to do. But, felt that in doing the exhaustive planning many times the clients lose out on patience and complete data collection was a significant challenge. Hence, came up with the idea of 10 Minutes FP (I know, one can’t make a Financial Plan in a 10 minute time) but the bigger objective was that we wanted to make clients curious about the concept. And we could at least give them a trailer about what Financial Planning is, by doing the excel calculations of their Goals and give it to them. This helped us check on their interests. At times, it could be just one goal that client is looking to achieve.

Having started this for clients I felt that our team should also get their own 10 Minutes Financial Plan, so they know where they stand and what needs to be done. During this exercise, I got to know that one of the older employees had taken a Loan by pledging Gold at a whopping 3% per month. Immediately nothing was possible as income was not really matching but this made me think and realise the actual impact of such loans hence I directed him not to continue such heavy interest loans rather pay off as early as possible. Result of this exercise: all team members were made to realise the importance of Financial Planning. Almost all of them got their term life and super top-up health insurance. The practice of ensuring protection started seeping into all our Relationship Managers DNA.

They started talking about 10 Minutes FP to staff from the other departments and nudged them to take Term Life as well as Super Top-up Insurances.

Back to After COVID-19 era.

We lost one of our colleagues aged about 32 to COVID.

Fortunately, he was nudged by one of our RM and implemented his suggestions to get permissible term life insurance.

We were shocked to know someone known from our own office goes away so early and that too at such a tender age.

On second thought felt relieved that with the Life Insurance claim hopefully the financial needs of his family and his son shall be taken care of.

I strongly feel we all are in a noble profession as we can actually be of help not only our investors but our team too.