My Journey of becoming a Money Management Coach; Why I want to teach people how to manage their money?
Flashback: It was the year 1988. I was around 15 years of age at that time. My mother had suffered two attacks of epilepsy since morning and was lying unconscious in bed.
My father was in office at Palam. It was 12pm then and he would be back by 3pm only. It was a long hard wait of 3 hrs for me as there was no way of reaching him. And I was terrified by the thought that mummyji may relapse again into her spasms. Luckily no more spasms happened till the time my father arrived and I was relieved to have him back home.
I described to him what had happened and he said that he will take my mother to see the doctor. In the evening, he was to take her to see the doctor for ECG, etc. He decided to take her pillion riding on scooter.
Given the state that I had seen my mother earlier in the day, I was afraid that her spasms may relapse while on the way. I requested my father to go in an auto-rickshaw but he assured me that everything will be fine.
They left on scooter and I stayed back at home still feeling tight within myself…
After some 30 minutes or so, one of our neighbour’s brought our scooter home. He said my mother had spasms relapse on the way to doctor. I felt huge surge of anger within me. Despite my repeated requests, my father had refused to get an auto rickshaw probably just to save a little money.
I swore in my heart that when I grow up, I’ll never let money be a constraint for my family to be deprived of urgent medical care.
Fast forward to year 2010. Commonwealth Games were going to be held in Delhi. I, being located in NCR, was in vantage position to to be able to witness a rare sporting spectacle happening in India.
… and I was not going to miss this huge opportunity!
It was a big chance for me to give sports exposure to my sweet 4-year old daughter, Aarzoo.
Another flashback: The 1982 Asian Games still rankled in my heart. Although that was the time when my father got a colour TV for us to help us watch colour telecast (a huge novelty in whole of India), I still felt that not going to watch games live in stadium was a huge miss.
I had realized the enormity of watching sports live when I had the opportunity of being at Wimbledon 1998 and watching my Tennis idols live.
I was working a in a big-brand MNC at that time and had already applied for 2 weeks leave well in advance. But just 2–3 days before my planned leave was about to begin, my manager got after me to change my leave plans for some so-called urgent business, and almost cancelled it! However, I stuck with my leave plan and it did cause some friction and heat between myself and my manager. It was certainly worth it!
The opening ceremony passes were already there with me and I had planned to take my family daily to a different sporting event every day. And boy, what a thrilling opening ceremony it was!! I still get goosebumps recalling A. R. Rehman singing ‘Jai Ho’ live in Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium. And the amazing fireworks that followed were stunning. It was a world-class spectacle.
The smile and the look that I saw on Aarzoo’s face was priceless.
And her smile was reflecting on Preety’s (my wife) face too!
Overcoming all the mismanagement hurdles related to games, I managed to procure passes for events on all the days. We attended the games live on all the days, all in different venues and also saw Leander-Mahesh tennis doubles match.
The outcome, Aarzoo herself took to tennis and went on to become India’s U-14 top 50 player.
Hopefully this love for Tennis and sports will help her in long stead.
And as they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, the following ones would take me well beyond the prescribed limit for this story :-). I wish to share the incredible joy I experienced those 2 weeks.
These pictures never fail to bring a smile on my face and give me a feeling that I contributed to my family’s happiness in a way different from my staying and working at office. But I could do it because I had the confidence to go for what I value and that confidence came because I had sound money management in place.
Moral of the story: Career and job are important, but so are your own values. Good money management boosts your confidence so that you don’t have to bow down to your boss’s finicky diktats causing you to miss on life’s precious joys.
In the 28 years of my financial journey, I have learnt quite a bit about managing money and how money works…
In my financial journey, I did quite a few things right although I did my fair share of mistakes too.
All in all, I find it quite intriguing that money plays such an important role in our lives and our education system doesn’t teach us much about how to manage money. All that we get to learn is from hearsay or parents’ experience (good or bad; mostly outdated) or from what our friends tell (themselves not knowing much). Or we get some product mis-sold by some agent with his vested interest.
I intend to fix this gap so that one doesn’t need to learn from expensive mistakes.
Over the last 15 years, I have successfully coached 23 of my friends regarding money management and helped them get started on their journey towards financial freedom.
Now, I have decided to take this further.
I have made it my mission to help at least 100,000 people starting their career journeys achieve Financial freedom.
Another reason for my embarking on this journey is that I love helping people and find real, true joy in sharing my knowledge wherever it can help a good cause. Ever since childhood, I have enjoyed teaching and sharing knowledge and I myself have been blessed with adoring teachers and mentors who showered their love and knowledge upon me. So, I want to continue this tradition and take it to a higher level.
Till February this year (2023), I knew my mission was helping people achieve financial freedom, but I was struggling to find ways and means of accomplishing this. I thought of doing offline sessions to teach money management but then it struck me why not to use technology to have a bigger outreach. One thing led to another and by the end of March, I came across Siddharth Rajsekar’s ad on YouTube. I attended Sidz’s webinars a couple of times and his values system (code of honour) struck such a resonance that I immediately subscribed to ILH diamond membership on 31st March, 2023. On 1st April, 2023, I attended Succesgyan’s “Trainer Growth Summit”, again hosted by our beloved Sidz and that led to my subscribing for Blair Singer’s Gold program.
Since then it has been all learning and I feel moving really fast in the direction of accomplishing my mission. I feel privileged to be part of the ILH community and love the vibes that we all ILH members share.
More power to you all (MPTY).
Dinesh Kumar
Founder: MegaMoney Mastery Club
Connect with me at https://linktr.ee/dineshmegamoney
