Love is in the air, 14th Feb is believed to be the day of expressing your love if you haven’t yet or re-expressing your love to remind your loved one that you still want to happily share your life with him/her. As time flies, love involves many different things; from our marriage to kids’ marriage; from sharing responsibilities to working for a better tomorrow; from an international holiday to planning for old-age.

Despite its inevitable commercialization, Valentine’s Day still remains an incredible opportunity to connect and express love. But what about sustaining the same? Whether you are single, in a relationship or married; you would not deny that to maintain this love you need to have funds – you need to have money. Perhaps the most important, and often neglected, the aspect of building a future together is figuring out how to invest in it.

Valentine’s Day, then, is the perfect chance to sit down with your partner to discuss your plans for the future, and also to discuss how you could begin to work together to bring those plans to fruition. At the very foundation of this venture is initiating the conversation on financial planning.

While this might not seem like the most romantic idea or a sweet valentine’s day plan, consider this- what shows more commitment than planning for the future you want to share together.

However, I understand that money and finances are a conventionally complicated topic to bring up on a romantic day but here are a few ways you can move towards a richer life this Valentine’s Day:

• Talk about Wins – talk about the wins of your life. Begin by defining what makes you happy today and what is it that would make you feel happy tomorrow. Ask your partner the same questions. Listen, listen deeply. Move on to discussing what you both would want from your future together. This could involve dreams, aspirations, personal and professional goals, and everything else you both desires. Move to pen these down.

• Document your Wins – Once you complete defining these goals, zoom out and come back to the present. Take a note pad (virtual or real) and pen these down vertically. Then, add targeted year, amount and priority rating against each of these horizontally. Name this document something that will stay close to you and remind both of you of your touchstone. This will help you in the future to be focused and give an extra push to work towards what you both desire the most.

• Shield these Wins – To shield is to protect against unforeseen events and you need to shield your wins. You need to protect the ones most important to both of you, and also each other’s future. In the personal finance field, we call it Insurance. If you want to sustain the current lifestyle for your partner and vice versa, you both need to insure your lives. The easiest way to do so is via Term Insurance. It can be easily bought online and has the cheapest premiums compared to any other type of life insurance.

• Provide for these Wins – actions do speak louder than words and one of the most important things is for you to action the plan you articulate. In order to provide for your wins, you have to start saving and then convert the savings to investment. The first step here is to ear-mark savings for different goals in the future and then work towards automating the same through monthly SIPs i.e. Systematic investment plans.

• Appraise these Wins – as time goes by, you will have more wins to add, more goals to achieve. Moving forward, annually gifting the 3 virtual roses – review, rebalance, repeat – would help you stay on track and ensure course corrections where ever required.

These 5 steps may sound simple but are not easy to begin. With the aim of sustaining Valentine’s day, every day I urge you to take the first step and the rest will fall in place.

Wishing you a more fulfilling Valentine’s Day!