Think Your Salary Is Enough? Read This.

Disclaimer: If you are happy with your salaried job, and you hurt easily . . . don’t read.

All our lives, we have been brought up being advised to never dream big — take a safe route to success, get settled and leave this world unnoticed. Mindsets like this will never take us anywhere — we will spend the rest of our life merely settling bills and paying EMIs for our home and car loans.

Think about it.

You start a job with a basic salary, you are so excited that at least you have a job, and at the end of the month, you get a credit alert in your bank account.

In the next three months, you are looking for more money, because it seems as if the entire universe now knows that you have money and your “wants” suddenly increase.

Before you know it, you’ve finished spending the money before the salary even comes.

“Oh, I really like this bag, I’ll get it by the end of the month when I get my salary.”

“Oh, this One Plus Three seems to be great, and I’m tired of my Samsung heating up anyway . . . I will get it by the end of the month.”

On the 1st, you get a credit alert from your company account.

On the 2nd, you pay for the bag.

3rd, you pay for the One Plus Three.

4th, you send pocket money to your parents to let them know you are ‘doing well’.

5th, you settle your EMIs.

6th, you service your car and go shopping for food and personal essentials.

7th, you run out of money and you wait for the end of the month again.

Familiar with this cycle? The new month is just starting…and you are already broke. I read you, you say that your home and your car are yours — your comforts are taken care of and that you don’t care about going broke sometimes. Let me give you some hard facts.

Consider your salary to be a healthy Rs. 50000/month. Alright, let’s be generous and say you earn Rs. 60000/month. Remove the PFs and the taxes and you’ll be left with Rs. 50k. Let’s start with that. (…ignoring the millions of engineers who earn peanuts and ‘respectable’ 20Ks)

Let’s also consider only two basic needs to proclaim a healthy lifestyle — a home and a car. ( . . . ignoring multiple other spends — children education, essentials, and so on.)

Today, the cost of a good car is anything between Rs. 8 lakh ~ Rs. 15 lakh — let’s consider it to be Rs. 10 lakh.

The cost of a home in the urban area? Let’s take Bangalore — a good home will cost anything between Rs. 70 lakh ~ Rs. 2 crores. Let’s consider it to be Rs. 90 lakhs.

Together, the cost of a good car and a good home is Rs. 1 crore.

You earn Rs. 50k per month.

In 2 months, you will earn Rs. 1 lakh.

1 crore is 100 lakhs.

Therefore, you’ll earn a crore in 200 months.

A year has 12 months.

A crore can therefore be earned in 200/12 = 16.67 ~ 17 years.

Read that over again. You need 17 years to earn enough to pay for a home and a car . . .

…and, that’s not considering the inflation, and the burgeoning compound interest on the EMI you need to pay.

No, that’s not all.

Here’s the catch: You should not spend a single penny of the money you earned.

Yes, you can’t pay for anything else — not the vacation, not the marriage, not the essential clothing, food, and other requirements, you get your salary — you must save it for the next 17 years in order to pay for a home and a car.

(…don’t tell me that you will get pay hikes — industry average pay hikes are always lesser than the inflation rates, so don’t get me started on that.)

Scary? But that’s what we have been doing all our lives.

In our mind, we keep saying “I need to earn some more money, I can’t continue like this.”

You start to think about getting a new job that will pay you more money or a promotion.

Whether you get a new job or a promotion, this “looking for money” cycle can never end. You will always need more money…So you need to make more money. Being employed can never give you the life you want to manifest, you can only create a so-called ideal life inside the boundaries you are set.

If you are happy with this life, then great. But, I know there are so many others reading this and saying Damn!

To you, I say . . . We are not meant to live a safe life. We are meant to reach for more.

Being safe is not a victory, to keep pushing boundaries is.

Give yourself an objective — can you take the leap of faith? Have that extraordinary startup idea? Take the plunge. Set a goal — something that is so humongous that you know that you may fail big time.

Infact, let me rephrase it. You WILL fail. Welcome it.

A year or two of less earning is better than a lifetime living just an adequate life.

Be courageous. Face the atrocious comments the society will make. I used that as a catalyst to keep learning, staying up until late, giving up my weekends, searching for new clients, getting all sorts of connections, betting on my own credibility in a project bigger than me and my skills.

This is the ultimate trick of entrepreneurship, and more in general — at least for me — in life. Find something meaningful to you: give yourself a crazy target, something that most of the people won’t accomplish, knowing that you could fail big time, and keep pushing in that direction.

Sooner or later, if you keep going, things will happen.

Just don’t give up, don’t settle for a salaried safe harbor, push through — you will end up with your dream life finally in your pocket.