Our 8th investor story-   By Anonymous

This is my story and somehow, I do not wish to reveal my name. But I want to tell you from my experience that use your money and savings wisely because saving money is not easy. It takes lot of time and control over spending.

Name of my story is – *Penny wise pound foolish*

There are savers and there are spenders. There are wise savers but not so wise spenders, like me. My recent experience taught me a life lesson that I would never forget. People who saves money in wrong places, do not understand how much it (such ways of saving) costing them.

Here is me, a real-life example and a real story: – I am  quite good with money savings. I feel really happy when I save money. I often try to find out good deals for money saving. Of course, its not bad to grab any good deal, doing DIY or opportunity where you can get the quality stuff with low price.

But recently, I done a home improvement project (sorry, can’t be specific here with project details) by DIY method in order to save money. Initially, DIY not was on my mind. So, I thought it’s better to check with some service providers for this project and take a rough estimate of how much it will cost. To get a better deal, I tried to get 2 – 3 estimates of project cost from different professionals. It took me almost 2 months to get the details and final cost as these service providers visited and checked my home, suggested additional changes in the plan, materials requirement etc. I wasted my 2 months in this process. As I didn’t find any good deal, I decided to go for DIY.

Before Starting, I did some research on internet about this work and also saw few videos. I was quite excited and confident while starting the project on my own. Unfortunately, this DIY project failed as few things went wrong. I searched for how to DIY but not for how to fix mistakes. As I didn’t know how to fix the things which went wrong, the entire project needed to be redone.

This all process causing me now with loss of money (double), value-able time, my efforts and also with doctor visits due to body pain (जिसका काम उसीको साजे). I think underestimate or overlooked  the efforts, skill, training require for this project. I learnt my lesson in hard way, lost my good sum of savings by doing DIY at wrong place.

I would like to suggest who is reading my story- We all focus more on saving money but at the same time we lose focus on big picture.  While grabbing the best deal in the market, we often neglect on hidden associated costs. Like when we are calculating real rate of return, inflation decreases the returns, so as these hidden costs reduces our real value of savings.  Be a good saver but also a wise spender.

Thank you for reading my story.

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