Financial Planning for a well qualified, salaried individual is fairly simple. If he does not jump around too much – has one/ two kids, buys a house, car, pays for an occasional holiday for his parents….then just do a couple of SIPs, take a term insurance, and well life is done.

However, if you have people from other industries and those who are not EMPLOYED, life becomes far, far more difficult.

Look at the careers of the following people in the sports and entertainment industry – Sachin Tendulkar, Vinod Kambli, Ravi Shastri, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, Sourav Ganguly, Irfan Pathan, Ajit Agarkar, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, Neha Dhupiea, Dipti Naval, Sarika, Amrita Rao, ….(this list was chosen with a little help from a film mag editor).

Obviously these people can be categorised in the following manner:

Early success and stayed there: Sachin, Sourav, Ravi, Priyanka, Kareena

Early success and then slipped: Vinod, Laxman, Ajit, Mohd. Kaif,

Slow success, but earned well: Neha

Reasonable success, earned modestly: Amrita, Dipti Naval, Sarika,

Fairly obviously there is no one formula that would have worked for all of them. It was easy to categorize them as “sports guys” or ‘film guys and film girls’…

For people like Sachin the income from the sport (main income) was itself so high that his investment income could have gone to build other sources of income. Same story for Sourav Ganguly also.

Now if you see people like Vinod Kambli (let us assume he comes from a lower middle class background) – he got too much of financial success. Now this success would have blinded him and he could have exhausted his money – too fast – and may not be now in a position to live on his passive income. Mohd. Kaif may now not play much for India – sounds cruel, but the reality seems to be that. So for Mohd Kaif his earnings from domestic cricket is an important source of income. The income that he earned from international cricket would not have been too great to create a corpus for his entire life.

Of course the cricketers were rescued by IPL (Indian Premier League) – so Mohd. Kaif, Ajit Agarkar, Pathan, have got a fantastic lease of life and they could be earning at least Rs. 2-4 crores per annum – which is a fantastic amount of money in any part of the world.

Remember sportsmen also have very high expenses – right from some personal coaching, travel, communication, etc. For e.g. if Irfan Pathan wants the services of a coach in South Africa, he will have to fly to SA, stay in a decent hotel and engage the services of a good coach. Similarly dietician, doctor, …etc. nothing comes free.

In case of women filmstars who do not marry or marry a bum who cannot handle money, their problems are also magnified. At some stage in life they have to take a call that they have to quit…When to take that call is really difficult to say! A 32 year old actress has to take a call whether to spend Rs. 15 lakhs on a gym, dietician, make up…..etc. etc. HOPING to get a call or should reduce such expenses.

It is not easy for a planner to help them…but they have to do it…

Man life is tough!