#1 | Arun: Millennials — Part I
‘ Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.’ — Naval Ravikant
Short story:
Arun, a 26-year-old is the single child who lives with parents in the heartland of Bengaluru. Arun has lived in this city all through his life and is a true Bengalurian by heart. He currently works as an operations manager in a young tech startup. Arun’s love for technology makes him an early adopter of tech gadgets and services as and when he discovers them. Arun comes across a very mindful individual and he does not cease to surprise you with his quotes on life. This is a story of Arun’s journey through his finances, technology and mindfulness.
Family & Education:
- Arun completed his graduation in computers application, a 3-year course from a college in Bangalore.
- He wanted to pursue his higher education in Human-Computer interaction from one of the reputed institutes in the U.S. But his lack of preparation for both the course and the exams pushed him to take up a job instead.
- Both of the Arun’s parents are retired and they stay with their son in their home. They recently moved to a new home that Arun brought for his parents.
The journey of jobs:
- Arun started his career in his early teens, where he ran an iPhone unlock service out of him home. iPhones from the U.S that were locked under a certain mobile career network were unlocked for price. Arun ran the gig for almost 3 years. As and when Apple started entering the Indian market directly, Arun had to shut shop but never pushed it into a formal business.
D: Did you ever try pushing this service like a proper venture?
A: Never. Our idea was to do this thing on the side so that we could buy a lot of Apple products and enjoy. I never really thought of taking it forward. We were just 16 or 17 back then. We did not even know what a startup was but we were Entrepreneurs. We had around 3000 customers. We did this for around 3 years.
- Arun later moved on to take up a full-time job and he has shifted three jobs since then where he has juggled a bunch of roles from support, sales, operation and management.
- Arun’s curiosity to learn and excel makes him a hustler and a natural fit for young startups.
My sales philosophy was simple, you tell your story and I will tell my story, if that coincides, then you can buy my product. That how I looked at my job.
Financial Journey:
Arun has experimented with various digital products and financial instruments out of his curiosity.
Bank accounts:
His early entrepreneurship stint and a banker mom had him open his first bank account and acquire a debit card at a very early stage of life.
D: How did you manage your finances during your startup days? Did you have a bank account?
A: Yes. I had a joint bank account with my mother in Bank of India. Since I was a minor I couldn't get an account of my own. I always wanted to start a bank account, mostly for the debit card. I still have that account, it’s mostly used by my mom. I would give my customers an option to pay me online through that account. They can either pay me online or through cash offline.
Deciding factors to choose a bank:
D: Why did you choose HDFC?
A: Because they had a good mobile application. I would have done a bit of research about it before opening the account and we also had a bank's branch near my home, like 5 mins away. I thought even if some issue occurs, I would be able to walk in and clarify.D: Why DBS?
A: DBS is the Development Bank of Singapore. DBS has this Digibank application, where you could open a bank account online by doing all the verification process online. It also has a good saving rate of 7% if you have a considerable amount as the balance and finally, I like their design and I like yellow. Probably that's not the main reason but that is also one of the reasons why I wanted to start a bank account with DBS.D: What kind of planning went in while buying the home?
A: We had a land that we sold for around 25 Lakhs. I had some savings and my dad had some savings that accounted to 35 Lakhs and the rest was a loan. Also, my cousin’s father was AGM in a bank. He guaranteed me that he would take care of all the paperwork and my cousin had just got the loan from the same bank. I did some research on this entire home loan procedure and my criteria were simple. I wanted to get the loan in the easiest way possible without going back and forth to the bank. That’s why I chose corporation bank. All of these things came together and I got a deal with the owner.
Credit and Debit cards:
Deciding factors to hold a card:
D: You mentioned that you used to fly to Singapore frequently, how did you manage your finances?
A: I used to have an HDFC credit card and I would pretty much use that to swipe everywhere in Singapore. That also helped me increase my credit limit. Later the organisation introduced Happay, where they would preload my card for expenses and they would also allocate a certain amount to spend per day.D: Where did CITI card come from?
A: CITI because, they would give a lot of jet miles for the credit card spends and I used to fly a lot and I have collected a lot of jet mileage points and I don't know when I am going to use them, but yeah I got a CITI credit card primarily for that purpose.
Payment apps:
D: What are payment apps that you use?
A: I yesterday installed Mobikwik, don’t know for what reason. But they have come a long way, I feel they are one of the better payment apps. But I primarily use PhonePe for payments and secondary is Google Pay.D: Why PhonePe?
A: The best feature about PhonePe is that I can transfer money from one of my bank accounts to my other bank account. They have a feature called “The self” where can list all my bank accounts and transfer money between them. For example, I can transfer money between my HDFC bank account to DBS bank account and they also have the QR code scanner handy on the app. Also, all my friends are on PhonePe, but that does not matter now.D: Then why not Paytm?
A: Paytm, I feel is a slow app and they are too cluttered and not sure what to do when I land there. That’s the reason I do not use Paytm. I still do, but only when there is no choice.D: What about Google Pay?
A: Google pay is fun. For the longest time, I did not try out Google pay. I know people were going gaga about it like they were earning 5000 Rs on scratch cards. I tried it out later. I still today do all my bill payments on Google Pay as it gives me a conversational view of all the payments and lets me know if I have paid on time or not. But for anything else like splitting the bill among friends and all I use PhonePe.
Utility bill payments:
Home loan payment:
D: How do you pay your home loan?
A: It's a little shitty process. I have listed down my Corporation bank account on PhonePe and my salary hits on HDFC and I transfer the money from HDFC to the Corporation bank account on PhonePe. Once the money hits the corporate bank account, the money is auto deducted. I have not done my ECS (Electronic Clearing Service) yet. Once that is done, it will be automatically deducted from my HDFC bank account itself.
Credit card payment:
D: What would be next payment that you would do?
A: I would pay my credit card bill. My Citi bank credit card bill would be generated on 20th of the month and I will have to pay by 6th. I do the payment through CRED. I have been using them from day one.D: How were you paying your credit card bill before that?
A: I was paying through my DBS app. I would transfer money from HDFC to DBS and pay the CITI card bill. I don't see an option pay from HDFC to CITI card or I have never explored the option. DBS is easy as it is on the phone and I can unlock via fingerprint and it is easy to use.D: How did you decide to use CRED?
A: I follow pretty much everyone on Twitter and I also follow Kunal Shah. He once posted saying that he is working on something and I downloaded the app. I like the idea behind it. So the idea is that Indians are not being rewarded for everything right that they do. That's why the system fails right? I like that. I instantly downloaded the app, gave up on my privacy and said, I don't care if you read my mails, I want a good experience to pay the bill. It's so convenient. I don't really get the points system. Sometimes I have won, sometimes I don't. But that doesn't really matter. The convenience of getting a notification for payment is what really matters.
Utilities:
D: What are the other associated bills that are generated?
A: Every month around 8th, I get my BESCOM bill. I get a notification on Google pay and I pay that. It comes to somewhere around 1,300 I guess. Similarly, I get a notification for water bill and earlier we had a BSNL landline, but we gave up on that. I used to pay that bill also on Google pay. I pay the Airtel bills on the Airtel app. There is no specific reason for that. Maybe I do it for the cashback.D: How do you use to pay before Google pay?
A: Before Google pay, I used to use PhonePe, even before PhonePe I use to use this app called Karanataka One. It's a government app where you can pay all your utility bills at one place. If you enter your RR number, it would fetch the bill. RR number is the number that you get with your meter. I also used to pay my water bills on that.
What is RR number?RR is Revenue Register number assigned uniquely to all the consumers. Consumers installations are identified based on this unique number.RR number is equivalent to Account ID. RR number is an alpha numeric (N1AEH2553) but Account ID is 10 digit number.
The offline grocery purchase:
D: How do you manage the grocery purchase every month?
A: So I take my mom to this one store called MK Ahmed Bazar and we purchase all the required groceries for the month in one go. It comes to around 3-4k and I give my card. This is how we have been doing grocery shopping for almost 10 years. My mom did try out Big Basket once, but she always forgot something to order. But here she likes the physical see and touches the products. So she prefers it this way.D: So you tried online ordering?
A: I do order, only at the end of the month, whenever something is over or missed out. She would exactly know what she needs and it would come in two or three days.
Medical expense:
D: Is there something that you see as a recurring or one-time expense?
A: In term of monthly spend, my dad's medical expense is there. He is a dialysis patient. He has been undergoing treatments for quite some time. I order his medicines on pharm easy because they give you a 20% discount on the medicines. I order it whenever he says the medicines are over. It will get delivered to home. Other than this, I give my and dad Rs. 7000 each for their expenditure. They use it only when its absolutely required. My dad gets a pension and they both are self-sufficient in terms of doing their own chores like booking a cab on apps etc.D: How do you cover your dad's medical expenses?
A: He has medical insurance and it covers 90% cost of the dialysis. Each session costs around 2k and he has to go through 9 sessions in a month. I have made an excel sheet and passed it on to them as how much it would come to and how much we should pay. He has that as the reference and makes the payment. My dad got his PF money and he pays medical bills himself. He isn’t financially dependent on me that way.
This interview is broken into two parts. The second part of the interview talks about Arun’s investments, loans, insurances, life goals and ambition.
In meanwhile check our other series called ‘Decoding Bharat’, where we interview people from emerging economies in India
To read the complete transcript of the interview, please use the following link
About the research:
This documentation is a result of the in-person interview along with the participants’ consent. The interviews might be conducted in their native languages and translated to English in the best possible way to reach a large audience.
Disclaimer: The names and organisations in this documentation are masked to honour the privacy of the participant.
About D91 labs:
This research was executed and documented by D91 labs. D91 labs is an open-source initiative by setu.co to help Bharat build great fintech products. We organise and publish user research, insights and frameworks for fintech in India. Please follow us on medium for more exciting stories and insights on Bharat.
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