A first salary. A thousand questions. One clear roadmap.
Arjun just landed his first job and has no idea what to do with his salary slip. Priya is newly married and quietly juggling two loans she never had a proper plan for. Neither of them was ever taught how money actually works — and if you're reading this, there's a good chance nobody taught you either.
Most personal finance books are written for a different reader entirely — someone with a EPF, a credit score, and a completely different relationship with family, debt, and risk. This book isn't that. It's written specifically for a first-time earner in India today, in a metro city, navigating real family obligations, real inherited beliefs about gold and property, and a job market where no one is handing you a pension anymore.
The 6-Kadam Financial Roadmap gives you a simple, sequential system — six clear steps, in the right order, explained through the lives of two ordinary young earners finding their way one deliberate decision at a time:
• Kadam 1 — Build a starter emergency fund, sized for real metro-city costs • Kadam 2 — Pay off debt and start investing in parallel, not one after the other • Kadam 3 — Build a full emergency fund that can actually survive a real crisis • Kadam 4 — Start planning for your children's future, before it feels urgent • Kadam 5 — Decide wisely between prepaying your home loan and investing • Kadam 6 — Keep growing your wealth toward genuine financial freedom
Along the way, you'll learn how EPF, NPS, and mutual funds actually work, why a term insurance policy usually beats a combined insurance-investment product, how to tell an MFD from a SEBI-Registered Investment Adviser, and how to spot a financial promise that's too good to be true — all explained in plain language, without jargon, tables, or spreadsheets.
Every chapter closes with Your Kadam Journal — a fillable page built around that chapter's exact lesson, so the book becomes a running record of your own financial journey, not just something you read once and shelve.
Written by Col P Kiran Kumar, SM (Retd), a decorated Indian Army veteran of 29 years and a Sena Medal recipient who now brings the same discipline that shaped a military career to shaping financial futures as Founder & CEO of Astra Financials — this book treats financial planning the way discipline always works: not one dramatic decision, but a series of small, deliberate ones, repeated consistently enough to become a system you no longer have to think about.
If you've just started earning and don't know where to begin, this is the first book to read. Not the whole staircase at once — just Kadam 1.