Finance With Sharan — SHARAN HEGDE

Aditya Shinde
3 min readJul 5, 2021

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Sharan Hegde is the owner of Finance With Sharan

I think besides the ubiquitous belief in India that the stock market is for gamblers, the most pervasive myth that has been perpetuated for almost a century is that investing in a home in your early years is a smart and wise decision.

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  1. Background And Journey?

Sharan Hegde, management consultant at PwC working with 100+ companies on strategy and growth projects. Born and raised in the beautiful city of INDIA Mangalore where he did schooling and PUC.

He pursued B-Tech in Mechanical Engineering from RVCE ( Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College Of Engineering ) since then, he is working as a management consultant at KPMG and a product manager at Fin-Tech Startup called Kuliza before finally ending up in PwC.

2. How He Developed Interest In Finance And The Economy?

When he was about 8 years, his dad used to take him to their restaurant every evening. He was very fond of collecting and counting the cash at the cash counter. Added to this, his parents always taught him to save money, and by the time he completed his bachelor’s he saved his pocket money and gifts received by his grandmother.

At that time he won't have any knowledge about investing money and later he started searching for the techniques and ideas to invest money, he learns about the stock market, mutual funds, and many other ways.

His main source of information was Investopedia, articles written by top financial bloggers such as JagoInvestor, and YouTube videos of Pranjal Kamaran, Asset Yogi, and CA Rachana. This is how he started learning about finance and eventually, he started reading books about finance and got comfortable with the financial terminologies.

3. How Important It Is To Be Aware Of Finance And Investing?

No matter who you are and what you do, money plays important role in everyone’s life, so learning about “how to make money work for us” and in addition to working for money is an invaluable skill which is not taught by our teachers in school or colleges. People often don’t realize this until after 5–6 years of entering the job market.

When we enter the 30s, we start thinking about finances because of life-changing moments like Marriage, Getting A Child, or Buying New Home. It’s shame that almost an entire decade of growing money is squandered away due to the negligence of the importance of investing and it’s not our fault because we didn’t get any knowledge about managing finances in school or college time.

4. Common Myths People Have About Investing?

Besides the very common belief in India that the stock market is for gamblers, the most present in all parts that have been continuing for almost a century is that investing in a home in our early years is a smart and wise decision. To be honest, purchasing a home in the early 20s with the help of a loan is one of the worst financial decisions. With rental yield at 2–3% and an interest rate of 7–9%, it's a losing game by all measures.

Another myth is that real estate is the best performing asset class that never drops in value, actually, real estate has been giving 6–7% returns on average compared to 14% returns of the stock market. Also, real estate is more volatile than the stock market let’s take an example: during 1996 real estate prices fell by close to 30–40% in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi.

5. Who He Admire The Most And Why?

He really doesn’t have an external role model, to be honest. He thinks, he is similar to Matthew McConaughey Oscar acceptance speech in which he says that his hero is himself 10 years from now. And every 10 years he keeps changing it to himself a further 10 years later. By this, he never going to be his hero, and that in turn motivates him to constantly be a better version of himself every year.

6. Tips And Advice For Someone Starting To Get In Investing?

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