Thinking clearly about money is challenging. Acting in alignment with your goals about money is also challenging. Most of us want to be good stewards of our money and make smart money decisions while investing, yet sometime can fall prey to five common money mistakes. When it comes to investing, chances are you will make mistakes in the initial phases. Gone are the days when only secured instruments could give you the needed liquidity. While good old cash is the king, a balanced portfolio is slowly emerging as the queen as your money makes its movements. Investing and Saving are two different concepts related to each other but not really the same. So, here are top five that most struggle with and when avoided can make you wealthy. Indecision: With a plethora of options for investing available out there, distraction is normal. However, letting your hard-earned money sit idle in your savings account is not assisting you with your investing goals. Your savings account give you a rate of interest half of what a liquid mutual fund may offer. Liquid funds and short-term debt funds, beat fixed deposit rates for most banks as well. Over-diversified or Ultra Concentrated portfolio : Over-diversification is a category of mistake that majority make. This means you either have invested a little in too many asset categories without a plan and hold everything in a small percentage. There is a possibility that there are some common themes that you may have invested in. While diversification can complicate your portfolio. While the trend on ultra-concentrated portfolio is changing slowly, such a portfolio will not help you to get the best of multiple asset classes either. This could lead to overexposure to over exposure to one particular asset class and the same hitting a slack period will adversely impact your portfolio. Investing without goal setting : Making impulsive investments without understanding long term impact can affect your portfolio adversely. If you know you are going to need a particular amount and have reached closer to it using equity, it is always good to shift the said amount to a debt portfolio to help balance things in case the market trends go southwards. Not including emergency funds in your portfolio : This will adversely impact your portfolio as all of your goals can get disrupted if emergency corpus is not built first. Without emergency funds, one risks their long-term investing objectives especially retirement corpus, which undergoes utilisation without realising the fact that retirement lifestyle can be seriously affected if these are not replaced. Do not make the mistake to Zero Review your portfolio strategy : Re-visit your portfolio and goals at least twice in a year. You can also consider adding or modifying goals based on certain life-events. For instance, if you have planned for job solo retirement but are now  married, then your retirement funds goal will undergo drastic revision. Birth of a child could possibly mean an increase in expenses and financial planning to secure the child’s future as well. So, make new goals as you progress, keeping existing investments intact. Topping up existing SIP investments particularly for retirement funds is a good idea. After all, a top up will certainly help you accumulate more units that will prove beneficial on the longer end. In Conclusion : These five common money mistakes are just a natural part of our human decision making process. By understanding our financial behaviors, we can reduce the mistakes that can happen when making important investment decision. While you cannot always control the outcomes of your decisions, you can control the process by which you make a decision. Commit to making better money decisions today. Lawrence Coelho Email: secular@sezariworld.com