My Money View Story: How Varun Managed His Money Better

Varun Achar is an Engineer with a startup in Bangalore. He recently moved to the city from Mumbai after getting married. We caught up with him to understand how life and finances have been simplified with Money View.

Tell us something about your money habits

I am pretty disciplined when it comes to my money. We are not an extravagant couple and don’t really spend lavishly. We, of course, do the normal things like eating out, shopping etc. but we are prudent spenders. As a matter of fact, we save about 70% of our salaries.

Do you have regular discussions about how to save and invest money?

Yes, we talk about our long-term and short-term goals and accordingly plan our investments. For long-term goals like owning a dream home, we invest in SIPs in mutual funds as well have fixed deposits to finance those goals. For short-term goals like travel or redoing the house, we invest in shorter-term mutual funds that mature within 1-3 years. If not used, they contribute to our savings.

We generally do not invest in shares as I don’t have the time to invest in research or track them rigorously. I am mostly a moderate to safe investor.

Do you take the lead in financial decisions or does your wife do that?

Being a double income family, we jointly handle our finances. We have initiated a joint FD so that a certain part of our salaries goes directly there. We mutually discuss our financial goals and sync how our investments are doing every month or bimonthly. However, there are certain things that each of us takes a lead in like I take care of upgrading insurance plans. And there is a part of our money that we handle independently.

How did you track your finances before Money View

I used to tag my emails with tags like shopping. That way when I pulled up that tag, I got a good idea of how much I had spent on shopping that month. Apart from this, I did not track my finances regularly, just once a month or bimonthly only to understand how things were financially. It was not a detailed picture but gave me some idea of my spends.

How did Money View come into your life?

I chanced upon Money View through one of their advertisements on social media. I was curious and downloaded the App. I have been using it for almost 1.5 years now and am very satisfied with it. It has been helping me immensely to track, budget and monitor my finances.

How has Money View helped you?

Money View has subsconsciously instilled more financial discipline in my life. As I am finicky about keeping things organized, I love it that I get a summary and trends of my spends and can also set a monthly budget. That way I come back and check how much of the budget is still unutilized at any given point in a month and know how to tweak my spend. As most of my spends are online, I don’t have to manually input any data and get a lot of information without any effort with Money View.

I also love the reminder feature of Money View app. I had burnt my fingers a few times in the past when I forgot to make my credit card payments on time. Despite having auto-debit for most of my accounts, that had happened. Now Money View sends me reminders, and I always double check if the payment has been made or not. Besides, the payment also gets documented in the app thus working as a further check for me. I haven’t missed any payment since.

What has been among the coolest things that Money View has done for you?

Just a few months ago, I was planning my wedding. The biggest challenge was to keep my spends within budget. Money View facilitated how I kept track of my expenses. I did not go overbudget and managed to pull off the biggest event in my life with ease.

Tracking finances need not be cumbersome and boring anymore as Varun has discovered.

If you wish to share your Money View story with us and get featured on the blog, do write in to us at blog@moneyview.in.