Hisaab Barabar on Zee5: Money lessons that banks don’t want you to know | Mint

In 1986 BBC made a film about a person who defrauds a bank after hacking into their systems and siphoning off money that is usually rounded off to the nearest penny. It was called Smart Money. Hisaab Barabar attempts to say a similar thing but If only good ideas were executed well! This would have been a wonderful film that alerted citizens to a very important lesson about their hard earned money.

The film does ham-handedly handle the subject of money and it sort of deteriorates into bad comedy towards the end, but it makes a couple of seriously valid points.

Putting aside the rhetoric of the big releases this week, this little film offers us two really important personal finance lessons.

Your bank statements are sacred; treat them with respect

Radhe Mohan (Madhavan) is an everyman, a divorced dad with a young son. He is an upright collector in the railways, and is so good at numbers, he teaches maths to students on the railway platform. After putting his son to bed (save us someone from filmmakers who use annoying kids – ones who either talk too much or just keep repeating, ‘Papa! Papa!’ – in their films), Radhe Mohan is going through his bank statement when he discovers a discrepancy in the interest earned in his account.

Even though the amount is only ₹27.50, he realises that small amounts have been either rounded off or missing. Thanks to a friend he is trying to help and the secretly obtained statements from other account holders, he discovers that the bank calculates the interest one day later than they ought to, and that money is missing. The horrible OTT villainous owner of the bank Mickey Mehta (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is actually hoarding that money as cash in a warehouse. He behaves like such a buffoon that you begin to wonder how such a man would even think up of a scheme like this on his own!

At first people tell off Radhe Mohan offering to pay his twenty seven rupees because their problems are bigger. But Radhe Mohan explains how every little decimal point rounded off means lakhs of rupees over time.

Most of us have opted for receiving monthly bank statements by email. We barely explore the mobile app for the account because we either groan at the savings amount or are happy seeing money being credited to the account. And very few of us bother to check on transaction fees, fees for cheques, or even when and how interest is calculated. If we only pay attention to the little pennies, we could be saving lakhs. I am not saying our banks are not to be trusted, but it helps if you treat your account as though it were scared.

The magic of decimal numbers

The banker of Do Bank in the movie has been siphoning off the money from all the savings accounts of his bank and is ready to flee abroad with that money. He’s in cahoots with a political leader who helps him get Radhe Mohan into all kinds of trouble.

Radhe Mohan files a complaint with the RBI, which leads to him receiving a summons from the police. The officers are not kind to him for taking on a bank over a paltry sum of money, accusing him of conspiring to bring down the bank out of personal animus. His life spirals into chaos when he’s suspended from work due to a suspected discrepancy in his accounts (which is clearly a lie), his home is bulldozed for a flimsy, made-up reason, his child is threatened, and he is personally threatened by the banker: “I’ve tried to bring you down in many ways. Why is your nose still high?”

This cascade of events is so awfully shown, we begin to get irritated because Radhe Mohan is shown to be too much of a simpleton. We’re even supposed to share his surprise that the girl he seems to like – because she travels by the train every day – turns out to be a cop…Why didn’t he ask her what she does for a living when they were sort of dating over cups of tea? These things don’t add up!

But what makes sense is the money lesson Radhe Mohan tries so hard to explain. Its importance gets lost in the silly ending. And it has to be in the decimal points.

Let’s say you invest in mutual funds, putting a lakh every month for thirty years. Should you choose to invest in a fund through a distributor – as most of us do – then pay attention to something called the expense ratio. Now, choose the option to invest directly in the fund. Watch the expense ratio become smaller. Now look at how much your money is projected to become when you invest directly! You could be earning many lakhs more than if you had invested it through a distributor. Just as the movie says, ‘It’s chump change, who cares!’, in this case too, the ratio is small, but in the long run, you would make a lot more money than you thought!

The Madhavan we loved in Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein is shown to jump on a table before an enquiry committee, even his reaction to his child spilling milk is fake… The film has a great premise which could have been an eye-opener. It’s not as ‘josh’ creating as the film that just released in the theatres, neither does it have CGI flash, but you know that there’s a decent idea in there… Plus any movie where the lead couple shares so much tea is okay in my books I suppose…

Manisha Lakhe is a poet, film critic, traveller, founder of Caferati — an online writer’s forum, hosts Mumbai’s oldest open mic, and teaches advertising, films and communication. She can be reached on Twitter at @manishalakhe.