The Road After School: From Classroom to Gomantakvidyaniketan

Every child remembers a smell, a sound, or a street that they associate with growing up. For me, it was the distinct scent of old paper, ceiling fans whirring in the humidity, and the sound of rubber stamps hitting forms — the everyday music of my father’s office in the Gomantakvidyaniketan building in Margao, Goa.

I must have been ten or eleven years old when this ritual began. School would end in the early afternoon, and instead of heading home to cartoons and snacks, I would often make my way — sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend — down the familiar lanes of Margao’s commercial heart to meet my father at his office. It was an old building, the kind that carried decades of Goa’s history in its walls: colonial corridors, high ceilings, wooden shutters painted in that familiar faded government green.

That building also housed a branch of the Bank of Maharashtra, one of India’s public sector banks with a legacy stretching back to 1935. And it was inside that branch — cool and unhurried — where I first truly began to understand what investing meant.

The Monthly Ritual That Changed Everything

My father was not a man of grand speeches about money. He didn’t sit me down and draw compound interest curves or explain portfolio diversification. What he did instead was far more powerful: he showed me, month after month, the same simple act.

Once every month — always on roughly the same date — he would take out a small amount from his salary and we would walk together to the Bank of Maharashtra branch. He would fill in a form, hand over the cash or a cheque, and the teller would stamp his passbook. I had my own account there too. A Recurring Deposit account. Every month, a modest sum was deposited into it, faithfully, without exception — whether money was tight or comfortable.

To my young mind, this was unremarkable at first. It seemed like paperwork. A chore. But over months, and then years, I began to notice something extraordinary: the number in my passbook kept growing. Not by leaps, but steadily — like a plant that grows so slowly you forget it’s growing, until one day you look up and it’s taller than the wall.

“My father never told me to save. He simply showed me what saving looked like, month after month, without drama — and that was the loudest lesson of my life.”

What Is a Recurring Deposit? The Original SIP of India

Long before the term SIP — Systematic Investment Plan — became the buzzword of every mutual fund advertisement, Indian families were quietly practicing its older, simpler cousin: the Recurring Deposit (RD).

An RD is a banking product that allows you to deposit a fixed amount every month for a chosen tenure, earning interest at a fixed rate. At the end of the period, you receive your principal plus the accumulated interest. It is safe, government-backed (especially in public sector banks like Bank of Maharashtra), and requires no market knowledge whatsoever.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, when my story takes place, equity investing was far less accessible to the average Goan family. Mutual funds existed but were not as democratized as they are today. The stock market was seen by most middle-class families as speculative and risky. The RD, on the other hand, was trusted — solid as the bank branch itself.

But here is what my father understood intuitively: the product matters less than the habit. Whether you put money in an RD or a mutual fund SIP, the discipline of investing a fixed amount every single month — no matter what — is the real wealth builder. The RD was his tool. And it worked.

The Passbook Lesson: Watching Lakhs Take Shape

I remember the first time the passbook number crossed ₹10,000. Then ₹25,000. I was doing the mental math — how could such small monthly deposits add up to so much? My father explained it in the simplest terms: “You’re not just saving. The bank is also saving with you. That is called interest.”

Over the years, through multiple RD cycles — renewed and re-invested each time one matured — the corpus grew. By the time I was in college, what had started as a few hundred rupees a month deposited by a school kid in Margao had grown into a corpus of a couple of lakhs. This was not inherited wealth. It was not a windfall. It was built from the ground up, one small deposit at a time, in a government bank branch on the ground floor of a Goan heritage building.

It was, in the truest sense, my first investment portfolio.

The Move to Equity: When the Seed Became a Tree

There came a point — after I had finished my education and stepped into professional life — when I looked at the accumulated RD corpus and realized it was now large enough to do something with. The fixed deposit interest rates, while stable, were not going to beat inflation by a meaningful margin over the decades ahead. It was time to let the money work harder.

That’s when I made the transition to equity investing. Moving the corpus from safe bank deposits into stocks and mutual funds felt like stepping from a calm lagoon into the open sea. The waves were bigger. The returns could be greater. But the risk was real, and I felt it.

What saved me — what made the transition sensible and not reckless — was the mental framework my father had installed without ever naming it: invest regularly, don’t panic, think in years not days, and never invest money you cannot afford to leave untouched.

I began with index funds — the simplest, lowest-cost entry point into equity markets. Then direct equity, gradually, as my knowledge grew. The same habit of monthly investing continued, now as SIPs instead of RDs. The form had changed; the rhythm had not.

What My Dad Never Said (But Always Showed)

Looking back, the most remarkable thing about my financial education is that it was almost entirely wordless. My father never sat me down for a “money talk.” He never lectured me about saving or scolded me for spending. He simply lived the habit in front of me, month after month, year after year.

There is a concept in behavioral finance called modeling — children learn financial behavior more from watching their parents than from any formal instruction. Research consistently shows that adults who invest regularly often trace the habit to a parent or guardian who did the same. My father was my living financial textbook, and the Bank of Maharashtra branch in Margao was the classroom.

He taught me that wealth is not about income — it’s about the gap between what you earn and what you keep. He taught me that the bank is your partner, not just a storage unit. And he taught me that investing is not a one-time event — it is a commitment, renewed every single month, regardless of how the world outside looks.

The 5 Investing Lessons I Learned Before I Turned 18

Why Early Investing Matters More Than You Think

The financial world talks endlessly about compound interest, and with good reason — it is, as Albert Einstein reputedly called it, the eighth wonder of the world. But compound interest only works if you give it time. And time only happens if you start early.

Consider two investors: Priya starts investing ₹2,000 per month at age 18. Rahul starts at age 28. Both invest until age 60. Assuming a 12% annual return, Priya will have accumulated roughly ₹5.5 crore — while Rahul, despite investing for 10 fewer years, will have only around ₹1.76 crore. The ten years between them created a difference of nearly ₹4 crore.

I did not know these numbers as a child walking through Margao’s streets to my father’s office. But I felt them, intuitively, watching my passbook. Something was happening with money even when I wasn’t watching. That feeling never left me.

Goa, Money, and the Culture of Quiet Wealth

Goa has a unique financial culture. Many Goan families benefited from remittances sent by relatives working in the Gulf or in Portugal during the 20th century. Land ownership and real estate were traditional stores of value. But within this culture, there was also a strand of quiet, disciplined saving — particularly among working and middle-class families in towns like Margao, Panaji, and Ponda.

The Bank of Maharashtra, the State Bank of India, and cooperative banks held the savings of thousands of Goan families. Post office RDs and National Savings Certificates were popular tools. This was not glamorous wealth management — it was grassroots financial prudence, passed from parent to child in passbook stamps and morning walks to the bank.

My story is not unique. Across India — in towns and cities — there are millions of people whose first financial education came not from an app or a fintech platform but from a parent’s monthly banking ritual. That tradition deserves to be celebrated, and more importantly, continued.

From Margao to Markets: The Journey Continues

Today I manage a diversified portfolio — a mix of equity mutual funds, direct stocks, a few debt instruments for stability, and some real estate exposure. The numbers are different. The platforms are different. The vocabulary has changed: I speak of NAVs, expense ratios, alpha, beta, and rebalancing.

But every month, without fail, my SIPs run on auto-debit. The same fixed amount. The same date. The same discipline my father instilled in me in that bank branch on the ground floor of Gomantakvidyaniketan, Margao, Goa.

The delivery mechanism has evolved from a bank teller’s stamp to a mobile app notification. But the philosophy — invest regularly, invest early, invest patiently — remains exactly as my father lived it.

“The best investment advice I ever received was not from a book or a broker. It was from a quiet man in Margao who walked to the bank every month and let compound interest do the talking.”

How You Can Start Today: A Beginner’s Roadmap

If you’re a young person in India — or a parent who wants to teach their child about money — here is the simple path, inspired by exactly how I learned:

Step 1 — Open a Bank Account Early. Start with a basic savings account. For children, most banks offer zero-balance minor accounts. Bank of Maharashtra, SBI, Canara Bank, and others offer these across India.

Step 2 — Start a Recurring Deposit. Even ₹500 per month is a start. Choose a 12 or 24-month tenure. Watch it grow. The discipline matters far more than the amount.

Step 3 — Renew and Grow. When the RD matures, don’t spend it. Reinvest. Increase the monthly amount slightly each year as your income grows.

Step 4 — Graduate to Mutual Funds. Once you have ₹50,000–₹1 lakh saved and understand the basics, begin a SIP in a diversified equity index fund. Platforms like Zerodha Coin, Groww, or MF Central make this simple.

Step 5 — Learn and Expand. Read. Understand how markets work. But never let learning delay starting. The cost of waiting is always higher than the cost of learning.