Here are my observations as to why people do not get rich. Almost all of them will justify their being not well off – I had to pay for my parents expenses, my children’s schooling is expensive, my own medicines,…..blah blah. I find these as rationalisation and the deeper answer lies in the following….

1. Procrastination learning about money: Most of us love money, but are not willing to learn how to earn well, invest well, etc. The more you postpone the lesser the chances of accumulating a decent corpus for any goal.
2. Spending more than your income: the number of people who do not understand the difference between the CTC and the take home pay live beyond their cash flows. This means that they live off their parents or their credit cards.
3. Procrastination of financial learning means that they do not know the cost of postponing investments. So we keep postponing to a virtuous tomorrow and do not save, invest, or organize our finances today. Tomorrow, as we know, never comes.
4. Going into debt without a thought: Many individuals will just walk into a shop and buy a Rs. 55,000 item without worrying where the money is going to come from. So it is a want that is charged to the credit card not just the needs. Then the credit card company offers a usurious rate for an EMI which they HAVE to accept..so if your luxuries are funded at 43% p.a. interest costs, you cannot get rich. Just perish the thought.
5. Not knowing what is investing; An occasional equity share bought when the market goes down, averaging a falling share, investing in some sundry mutual fund,..then selling because you have held it for 4 years, – a series of disjointed, stupid, and most times irrational actions is NOT INVESTING. It is called time pass. When they show me that portfolio I know what they are doing, but believe me IRR is like a bad word for them. After all, they are qualified and they know everything do they not?
6. Not saving / investing in an organised manner: need I say more?
7. Being too aggressive: buying some bunch of shit cap and fooling themselves that they are in ‘mid cap’ direct investing.
8. Being too conservative: some of these people could tell you a million stories of how their friends lost money in the equity market. I tell them stories of plane crashes and road accidents. Why even tiger mauling, dog bites – after all risk has to be managed, NOT IGNORED.
9. Amazing to see people accumulate credit card bills, utility bills, etc. and making some extra penal payments OUT OF SHEER LAZINESS.
10. Letting cheques bounce because they had no clue how much money they have / had in their savings bank accounts.
11. Giving ‘loans’ to friends, relatives, neighbors, ….some of these people go around wearing a “I am a sucker” label. There are others who give loans to show off how rich they are. Neither the friends nor the loan come back.
12. Bad financial habits: drinking, gambling, playing on the stock market, …can rip you apart…