Your Money, Your Self-Care: Building Financial Freedom One Habit at a Time
Ramneek Ghotra on lifestyle choices, financial wellness and making money management part of everyday life
Chief Growth Officer, Finvasia Group
"Enjoy the money, but decide on it. You want a lifestyle you can keep up that isn't being paid for by your future self."
Ask most people what financial freedom takes and they'll say a bigger salary. I don't really agree. People on very good pay can still end up with almost nothing put away. What decides it, in my view, is how much of what you earn you actually hold on to and let grow over the years.
When the Salary Goes Up, So Does Everything Else
Incomes have gone up in India, no doubt about it. With that, we're spending more on travel, eating out, experiences, upgrading this and that. I'm not against any of it. My worry is the pattern where every increment quietly turns into a slightly more expensive life, and the savings rate never moves.
We Save a Lot, but How We Save Is Changing
As a country, we're actually decent savers. Household savings were ?54.6 lakh crore in FY24 according to data cited by SEBI, growing at a CAGR of 8.8% since FY18. People are getting more comfortable with markets too. The Economic Survey 2025-26 says equity and investment funds were 15.7% of household financial assets in March 2019. By March 2025 that had gone up to 23%, which is a big jump for six years.
Same Salary, Very Different Futures
So enjoy the money, sure, but decide on it. Say two friends both earn ?1 lakh a month. One spends a bit more after every hike. The other takes a fixed slice of each hike and sends it straight to an emergency fund, a retirement corpus or some long-term investment. In the first year nobody would notice a difference. Five or ten years on, one of them is a lot closer to financial independence, and it came down to that one habit.
None of what I'd recommend is complicated. Have an emergency fund big enough to actually matter. Stay away from high-cost debt unless you really need it. Let your savings go out automatically on salary day. Invest first, and only then let your spending go up, not the other way round.
Why Money Belongs in Your Self-Care Routine
I'd put financial wellness in the same bracket as health. We count steps and watch our sleep, and some of us track every gram of protein. Hardly anyone watches their cash flow or their loans that closely, and that's a big part of why money feels so stressful for so many people. Keep an eye on it and you're far better placed when something goes wrong.
It matters more now because debt is creeping up. RBI data has household financial liabilities at 6.4% of GDP in 2023-24, compared with 5.9% in 2022-23. Households are still the backbone of India's savings, mind you, at 62.1% of gross savings in 2024-25 as per government estimates. But the borrowing side needs watching.
Start by Knowing Your Numbers
Where do you start? Visibility. Know what comes in, where it goes and what you're keeping aside for your goals. If you've just started working, make your SIP, your emergency fund top-up or your insurance premium non-negotiable, like a health expense you'd never skip.
"Financial wellness doesn't mean giving up every treat. It means you're not funding today's lifestyle out of tomorrow's security."
From Reacting to Planning Ahead
Most of us only think about money when there's a problem. I'd like to see that flip, so the habits are already in place before anything goes wrong. You can still have your indulgences. Just don't let today's lifestyle keep borrowing from tomorrow without you noticing.
Systems, Not Willpower
That's really what financial self-care is to me. You set up automated savings, invest with specific goals in mind, check on your portfolio now and then and borrow sensibly. After a while it runs without you having to force it.
