Demonetisation and getting back your money

OK. Let's address the elephant in the room. Demonetisation.
What about it ? You may ask.

So RBI has demonetised two big notes in circulation 500 and 1000 INR. Objective is to dig up the black money that's in circulation and encourage digital currency.

Without going into the actual merits of it, I just want to touch on the impact of it in our lives.

For convenience sake I am assuming that most of the readers of this blog are the ones who are reasonably well off and have bank accounts and are savvy with digital transactions.

So let's see the impacts in the short term in our personal life.

Money Exchange:

If you are like any other family who has daily expenses and have domestic help at your home, do your grocery shopping at your neighbourhood stores chances are you have some money in the 500 and 1000 denominations lying at your home.

You might also have cash handed over as gifts and children's pocket money.

And maybe as many of us do you might have some handy emergency cash.

Your top priority is to exchange this cash so it becomes useful once again and has legal tender.

Options when this exercise started were 

• Goto a bank or post office and exchange the notes.
• Deposit the money in your bank account.

However by 24th November the option to exchange notes is no more and the only option would be for you to deposit them in a bank.

So Money Exchange is no more an option.

Money deposit in a bank:

Money deposit in a bank is an option that is available for all citizens and bank account holders.

The way to deposit the money is no different than how we used to do earlier.

Goto a bank branch, pick up a deposit slip and handover the money to a cashier.

Money in the old notes can be deposited in a branch until December 30th 2016.

Get your receipt and check if the money shows up in your account balance.

That's it.

Use Cash Deposit Machines:

Some of the savvy banks offer Cash Deposit Machines (CDMs).

These are available with some specific SBI branches as well.

So got a Cash Deposit Machine, login to your account and put in the old notes.

These are accepted and the balance shows up in your account.

So above are the ways you can get your cash back to you in some form.

Remember that if you have nothing to hide in terms of money and everything is accounted for you don't have to fear for depositing any amount of cash.

Yes, there will be additional scrutiny on large deposits made above 2.5 lakhs but that should not deter you and use alternate means to do your deposits.

In my next post I am going to address on how to use digital currency.

What can you expect ?

I am on a financial journey myself and I am interested to learn and share about all things related to finance.
As an analogy, the financial journey is very similar to any journey. When you want to go from a place a to place b, we start planning. A journey involves a lot of things:

• Know where you are

• Figure out where you want to go

• Find out the routes possible on reaching your destination

• Research the best route

• Consider the obstacles, short cuts, useful tips

• Zero in on an optimal route according to your expectation

• Make decisions and change your plan as you go so you reach your destination

And most important of all is to make a start. One can plan forever and keep improving it, but it will not make you move towards your goal unless you make a start.

Financial journey is a learning that one has to undergo through his entire life and figure out what works and what doesn't. Keep tweaking things based on your goals and figure out the path.

There will be obstacles in the journey and one has to deal with them.

There are various ways of investing and I hope I can help share my experiences and maybe help you in learning a few things on the way.