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Manage Your Personal Finances & Spending - A Layman’s Guide

Our relationship with money can be complex and confusing. Often, we don’t understand why we spend it the way that we do.

Perhaps we buy things we don’t really need. Or we think we need them but we never use them. Sometimes we think money will solve our problem… but then it doesn’t. Perhaps we’ve had arguments, or we’ve hidden or exaggerated or mistakes. But we can’t always say why.

Sometimes, as we start to earn more, it even seems as if we have less! Or perhaps we earn more but we don’t feel happier.

If these, or any other such financial confusions affect you on a regular basis, please join us for a no-holes barred introduction to how to better manage your personal finances. With sanity and with grace!

Objective

• Learn the importance of consciously planning spending habits.
• Learn the basics of the personal budget.
• Understand that a dollar is not always a dollar: it depends on what we want to use it for!
• Demystify the basics around borrowing money (loans, credit cards etc)
• Demystify the basics around lending money (bank accounts, investments, lending to friends etc)
• Learn about the ever-present temptation to spend – and what to do about it.

Outline

• Introduction to money – what actually IS IT?
• The basics of our emotions around money
• How a few systematic processes, some logic and a tiny bit of maths (it’s easy) can help
• What exactly are banks and other “financial services”:
  - What do they want from you?
  - What do you want from them?
• What exactly is a “financial advisor”?
• (Note: the facilitator is NOT one!)
• Tools, resources, next steps.

Who should attend

Anyone, at any level of financial income or wealth, is welcome. You may be struggling from paycheck to paycheck. Or you want to achieve a level of financial independence but have no idea how. You may even consider yourself wealthy, with discretionary spending, but don’t understand why you spend the way you do either. Or maybe you’ve started earning as an adult but you don’t yet know how to spend responsibly.

You may also have experienced problem spending in the past and struggled as a result. You may believe gambling or other chance events can help. Or maybe you think investing is the answer – but you know little about the markets and you’re fearful of mistakes.

Methodology

Presentations and context sharing. Group/pair exercises with reflection and class discussions. Authentic sharing of spending successes & failures. Develop an emotional relaxation around the subject.

Testimonials

Profile of Ravi Agarwal

Business agility transformations in financial services; coach, facilitator and mentor for human centric leadership skills. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, decision making, empathy, psychological safety

Ravi Agarwal, British born, raised and educated, has over 25 years’ experience in financial services and software engineering leadership roles around the world.
He believes the most powerful learnings happen when we touch the depth of our own humanity. When we do this authentically, it feels like magic. His facilitation style reflects this conviction. By engaging empathetically and individually with learners, whether one-on-one or in class settings, he allows people to uncover their depth, thereby bringing them into these precious learning zones for themselves.

Though intimate with information technology over several decades, he believes access to information can never allow you to flower to your greatest potential. So he focuses on the specifically human, character-centric skills. Emotional intelligence, critical thinking, paying attention, decision making in ambiguous contexts, empathy, psychological safety, mentoring & coaching are his life blood.

Not only does he create original content for such learning, he implicitly demonstrates the learning in real time via his facilitation techniques and who he is, so that attendees can absorb their learning from many dimensions. This is by far the best way to teach character skills.

So please join him. Learn how to blossom your humanity and your leadership journey in life, in the only way that really matters: your own.

1. Paying Attention and Critical Thinking with Emotional Intelligence: Taylor Swift – Lyrics as Poetry (for individuals & teams) (half day with writing homework)

2. Hands-on Introduction to Agile Product Development (for teams) (full day)

3. First Time Manager - the basics. One on ones; feedback, coaching & delegation (for individuals) (two full days)

4. Psychological Safety & Leader Vulnerability – a 21st century super skill (for individuals & teams) (half or full day)

5. Manage your Personal Finances & Spending - A Layman’s Guide (half day) (individuals)

Ravi, a natural polymath, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, England. He is extremely grateful to have studied Mathematics, French & English Literature under the guidance of some extraordinarily gifted teachers. Though many years apart, he is proud to call both Isaac Newton (English polymath, world pioneering mathematician) & Lee Hsien Loong (former Singapore Prime Minister) his college alumni.