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| Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash |
"Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship." - Benjamin Franklin
A year back, I was pondering a good bank balance - a good corpus to maintain in case one wants to retire early or be financially free to make major carrier changes. This was indeed a personal growth quest.
A tweet/post by a New York City based girl helped me set initial compass or say benchmark. She had set a target of $200,000 before leaving her regular job and building her own venture. I found it a reasonable and ambitious goal, especially considering I am earning in Rupee and at that time one USD equalled about INR 87. And therefore, the $200,000 target translated into about ₹17,400,000 at the time of beginning. If I started saving amount equivalent to my entire monthly salary at that time it would mean regular investment for well over a decade and a half (actually some bit longer).
But in any case, I set forth because the saying goes "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars". It was no easy task as on the onset I grew on average about $1,000 per month, but I was still inching towards it, even when the conversion rates were not being very favourable. Come 2026, the target started inflating and the growth depreciated significantly, not because I was earning less and spending more or I was jobless or I had some emergency expense. But because the value of Rupee started depreciating in an accelerated manner. This is truer since the beginning of US-Iran-Israel war. The value of Rupee stands 95.99 to $1 as on the date of this post. This means the earlier target of ₹17,400,000 has ballooned to ₹19,198,000. This means an addition of about 2 more years to goal achievement time if the rate of saving is maintained, which of course will be increasingly difficult in times of disturbed economies.
In essence, the wars beyond the border are going to have adverse effects on goals and lifestyles of people in unrelated countries, even if the country is amongst the top 10 economies in the world. Thus, anyone thinking (s)he is insulated and will not be affected by global happenings is mistaken. The world indeed is a big family, as noted in ancient Indian wisdom "वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्" or anglicized "Vasudhev Kutumbkam".
