I have always been a silent reader of this blog – and have never commented. So here is my rejoinder to the ‘Ideal young couple’ kind of a post that Subra did a few days ago. It took me a long time to write this post, and may not be of great quality, but here it goes. Subra of course has the full authority to alter / changes the composition, but I am sure he will not alter the facts.

We, my husband and me, are to the Manor born so to speak. Our grandfathers had big houses in South Bombay, and our parents are SoBo kids for whom Bombay ended at Dadar, and the only reason to go to the ‘Suburbs’ was to take a plane to travel. Most of our relatives are from So Bo and that is the background. Our grandfathers and then our parents had the luck or opportunity to buy big houses (even by non Mumbai standards) with spare bedrooms, and my father in law has a house with servant quarters too 🙂 . I am a single child of my father (who was a single child of his parents!) and my husband has a sister much elder to him and settled abroad.

All this background helps – it meant that when I was born my dad had opened a bank account and at age 3 he had opened a PPF account which has a nice big sum accumulated today, and it is nice to see it bulging. Our parents had been surrounded by friends by the brokerage community and many of today’s who’s who have been visitors in our house for some event or the other. Like Subra my father and father in law lost a few known people in the Mumbai bomb blast (ha it took us time to accept the word Mumbai). The portfolios of my father in law and my father had a lot of similarities, but my father in laws portfolio got a super booster in terms of Infosys, Wipro and TCS. All three made some seriously big money – and I would attribute it to our neighbor who was also a stock broker. All the portfolios in our houses – which one day will belong to our only daughter – is within spitting distance of 10 digits, and our annual household expenditure – including vacations, festivals, weddings (phew!!) is much lesser than the equity dividends that we receive. Seriously large surplus is left even from the dividends.

Now let me also give some numbers:

• I am a CA working in an MNC and I am extremely well paid, and I guess it was luck and being at the right place at the right time
• My husband is an Engineer MBA from a top Indian school and doing well in the BFSI space
• My parents were in the Jewelry business and most of their investments were in equity and some real estate too
• My inlaws were in the brokerage business for sometime and then in the 2000s retired from the business
• My inlaws portfolio is a super blue chip portfolio with Asian Paints, Siemens, HuL, ITC, Cummins, Supreme Industries, Hero Honda, Wipro, Infosys and TCS.
• My parents did well too with Colgate, PnG, Reliance, Gillette, Bajaj Auto, Cipla, Bharti Airtel, LnT, Hdfc, Hdfc bank, Nestle, Cholamandalam, Wendt, MRF, LMW,  etc.
• Me and my husband have continued with the same broker that my in-laws use and his word is final.
• Many of these shares have been in our portfolis since the ’70s, and some go back even to the ’60s
• Our broker’s son who is looking after the business is a couple of years senior to my husband and they do exchange notes
• My husband is brilliant in finding what is wrong with companies – and he should be in NPA identifying committees !!!

Now for some things that our parents did and we have copied:

• Never sell equities for ‘spending’
• Our incomes are far greater than our needs, and we are going to be net investors for a very long time
• We are rich by any world standards, and our daughter will be even more rich even if she does not earn money
• It is very important that me and my husband do not do anything foolish – we need to be a Dravid if we cannot be a Sachin
• We have been very lucky that we never worried about ‘realized income’ -a word I learnt from Subra
• We drive nice cars, take vacations but stay dirt cheap – our club membership of 2 So Bo clubs ensures good rates all over
• Our big expenditure is on servants, but my H and I are trying to be ‘independent’ of servants
• We are financially free in our 30s, but I guess we were financially free (for a frugal living) even when we were born
• We do use public transport for going long distances – but that is more to save time and not as an economic reason
• I am building a more Indian management centric portfolio – so we have bought Lupin, Dr. Reddy’s, Sun Pharma and Biocon
• Our parents have GSK, Pfizer vs our India centricity
• we do not have much investments in foreign currency – except the small mutual funds which invest abroad
• we have bulging PPF accounts, but not too much (as a %age) of debt instruments, but yes we do have Tax free bonds
• We are lucky that we have had no hospitalisation, bad habits (racing, betting, etc)
• My father in law is an avid trader too and is a very successful trader. My father is a pure investor
• I am a very careful analyzer of balance sheets and just love our family talk about equities – my mothers hate me !!
• I can go on and on..but 1000 word limit set by Subra is here!! So I stop…
• I have stuck to Subra’s rules – no names, no locations…but the shares were a huge temptation so succumbed
• Mutual funds in our portfolio is a rounding of error, so names do not matter, really