Sid Roy
There is a plethora of financial sites on the internet. So, what is the need for Dollar Mentor? How is it different and why did we call it Dollar Mentor? These are some of the questions that you might have if this is the first time on this site.
The idea for this organization was born from both personal experiences as well as discussions with many of our friends and acquaintances. Many of them are in the same boat – when it comes to financial education and feeling confident about managing one’s finance, they do not know where to start. This is exactly how we all felt when we were starting to realize the need for getting our act together. In fact, we probably spend years dilly dallying on financial decisions or made inappropriate choices being unsure. This inaction adds up over time and can mean completely different outcomes for future.
As we thought more about this, we realized a few things. One having too many choices is not always helpful when making the choice itself is work. In today’s busy world, your attention is fragmented with too many commitments to meet, too many decisions to make. There is no dearth of information if you go to your favorite search engine and type the term “financial education”.
Second, we realize that more and more Americans are increasingly distrustful of all the things that are to be found on internet. It is unclear where to get good information. Paid information is not always accessible to everyone and even then, trust is an issue. The return on advice is not clear and has always made all of us question such advice.
Third, the more we looked at some of the credible sources of information out there on the internet, it became increasingly clear that these sources are not appropriate for beginners. Some of the sites are chock full of information but they are not easy to digest, it assumes a certain level of knowledge. Worse, it makes personal financial management look intimidating and discourages novices from starting.
Our mission is to see if we can bring down this barrier. We ourselves spent a lot of time trolling through lots of sources. In the end, it is not clear that all of them helped. What if we had a mentor to share some of these experiences in a way that we could have consumed? Perhaps someone else’s lessons learned could have helped us avoid making the same mistakes on our financial journey.
So, are we creating another website where we publish articles and hope people find them? We do not think so. We believe an article on a random website cannot really make a good enough connection to be trustworthy. We intend this website instead to be the vehicle for a virtual mentoring opportunity for those who might need it. We are not completely sure how we are going to pull it off all yet and we intend to discover our way forward. But that is our intention.
So far so good. How will this initiative be any different from what has been done so far? How do we address the issues we have brought up?
First – who do we want to help? If you are intimidated by finance and if you are not sure where to start, then this was started for you. Our intention is to make things more accessible for people who really need it. We want to stress that by your awareness alone you have taken the most important step. you are looking to get help.
Second – we intend to have a local impact so that we are not a stranger organization on the internet. Instead, we want to make ourselves embedded in various community forums and be accessible to folks who need our help.
Third – we intend to play a mentoring role for those who need it, not by being paid experts but by being ordinary individuals who have just tried to do this self-education themselves. So, we are an explicitly volunteer organization with no goals for making any money or compensation. We are not financial advisors, and we are not going to recommend or suggest any specific financial product in any of our sessions. Instead, we want you to get better equipped to make that and other decisions about your finances.
If this is your first time here, if you are going through the same uncertainty, we hope to hold your hand by providing guidance and helping you get to the next step in your journey. We are considering various ways such as posting simple to understand guidance, presentations in various formats such as webinars or in local forums, or direct mentoring sessions. We would love to hear from you on how we could help you best on this anonymous survey here. Irrespective of what your situation is, you still have a choice. You can get informed and make better choices for tomorrow based on your own knowledge. Today’s trajectory matters more than the past. One influential book that some of us have recently read is “Atomic Habits”. In this book, the author says that to start a new habit, you need to break it down to the smallest first step that you can take. Your first step would be to bookmark this site for now and put a reminder on your calendar to check it back once a month.