Every January, two things happen with alarming predictability. One — the gyms of India fill up with a fresh batch of determined souls, armed with new sneakers and a borrowed bottle of protein shake. Two — millions of people open mutual fund apps, start a SIP, and declare loudly to their family groupchats: “This year I’m becoming financially responsible!”

Cut to March. The gym? Half empty. The SIP? Paused — because the market dipped, the NAV looked “scary,” and someone on a WhatsApp forward said the economy is doomed.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: starting a SIP is the easiest part. Staying invested when your fund is down 12%, when your uncle is screaming “FD pe bharo!”, when every financial influencer is predicting a crash — that is where real wealth is built. Or destroyed, depending on your patience level.

So pour yourself some chai, ignore your portfolio for the next ten minutes, and let’s talk about why SIP consistency is not just good advice — it’s the only advice that matters.

The Gym Membership Problem

Let’s begin with the metaphor that started this whole essay. The average Indian gym membership costs somewhere between ₹1,500 and ₹5,000 a month. The average Indian uses it for exactly 3.2 weeks before “life gets in the way.” The gym owner, naturally, has built his entire business model around this beautiful human tendency to start strong and quit fast.

SIP investments suffer from the same syndrome. You set up a monthly SIP with great enthusiasm. For the first two months, you actually open the app and nod sagely at your growing portfolio. By month four, you’ve forgotten the password. By month seven, when the market corrects and your returns go negative, you panic-stop the SIP faster than you can say “rupee cost averaging.”

The gym doesn’t give you abs because you joined it. It gives you abs because you showed up, three times a week, for a year, even when you didn’t feel like it. Compounding in mutual funds works exactly the same way — except it asks even less of you. It doesn’t want your sweat. It just wants your patience.

The Power of Compounding — Or: Why Einstein Was Right and Your Dad Is Wrong

Albert Einstein allegedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. He may or may not have actually said this — historians are divided — but the math is very real, and it does not care about your feelings.

Here is the simplest version of compounding magic: if you invest ₹5,000 a month starting at age 25, and your SIP gives you a 12% annual return (a reasonable long-term average for equity mutual funds), by the time you’re 55, you’ll have approximately ₹1.76 crore. You put in ₹18 lakh of your own money. The rest — nearly ₹1.58 crore — is interest earning interest, which is earning more interest, in a beautiful, endless loop that requires absolutely zero participation from you after you click “Start SIP.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting. If you wait until 35 to start — just ten years later — your corpus at 55 drops to around ₹50 lakh. Same monthly investment. Same returns. Just ten fewer years. You lost over a crore by procrastinating, and no amount of “I’ll invest double later” will fully compensate for those lost years.

This is what your dad doesn’t understand when he says “just buy gold” or “put it in FD — safe hai.” FDs compound too, yes. At around 6-7%, which, after taxes and inflation, leaves you with a real return that’s barely keeping pace with the rising price of dosa batter. Equity mutual funds, over long periods, have historically delivered returns that actually beat inflation by a meaningful margin.

The key word, of course, is long. Which brings us back to why you need to stop quitting.

Rupee Cost Averaging — The Desi Superpower Nobody Talks About

Here is a concept that sounds complicated but is actually your best friend: Rupee Cost Averaging, or RCA. And it only works if you stay consistent — especially when the market is falling.

Here’s how it works. Every month, your SIP deducts ₹5,000 from your bank account and buys mutual fund units at whatever price the NAV (Net Asset Value) is on that day. When the market is high, ₹5,000 buys you fewer units. When the market is down — this is the crucial part — ₹5,000 buys you more units at a cheaper price.

The investor who paused their SIP in March “because the market is falling” missed out on buying units at half-price. The disciplined investor who stayed put got a bargain — without even trying to “time the market,” which, as every professional will tell you, is mostly a myth practiced by overconfident people with Excel sheets.

Checking your NAV daily is the financial equivalent of digging up a seed every morning to see if it’s sprouted yet. It hasn’t. But you’ve disturbed the roots, stressed yourself out, and made no progress. Put the phone down. Let it grow.

The Long-Term Mindset — Or: Learning to Not Be Impatient

We live in the age of instant gratification. Amazon delivers in two hours. Zomato brings biryani in 30 minutes. Swiggy Instamart gets you groceries before you’ve finished regretting the purchase. We have been conditioned, systematically and ruthlessly, to expect results now.

Investing does not work this way. Investing is the ultimate karmic enterprise — the rewards are always delayed, always proportional to patience, and completely indifferent to your anxiety levels.

The investors who made legendary fortunes didn’t get there by watching charts, switching funds every six months, or panicking during corrections. They got there by doing something radical and deeply unfashionable: they waited.

• Don’t stop your SIP because “the market is at an all-time high” — markets make new all-time highs constantly. That’s literally what growth means.
• Don’t stop your SIP because “the market has crashed” — this is actually the best time to be buying units cheap. See: Rupee Cost Averaging.
• Don’t stop your SIP because your colleague made money in crypto — he’s also not telling you about the 40% he lost last week.
• Don’t pause your SIP because you read a scary headline — financial journalism runs on fear. Fear gets clicks. Your SIP doesn’t know what a headline is.
• Do increase your SIP amount every year when your salary increases. Step-up SIPs exist precisely for this.
• Do stay invested through market cycles — the downturns are temporary, the upward trend over decades is not.
• Do ignore your portfolio for at least three months at a time. Seriously. It performs better when you’re not watching.

Why We Quit (And Why That’s Completely Normal, But Still Wrong)

Let’s be kind to ourselves for a moment. The urge to quit your SIP comes from a deeply human place: we are wired for short-term survival, not long-term wealth creation. When your portfolio turns red, your brain registers danger the same way it would if someone threatened your lunch. The instinct is to act — to stop the bleeding, to pull out, to do something.

The problem is that in investing, the correct response to a market correction is usually to do absolutely nothing. Maybe even increase your SIP. This goes against every instinct, which is why most people fail at it, and why the people who succeed become inexplicably wealthy while everyone else wonders what their secret was.

The secret is boring. The secret is a standing instruction on your bank account that transfers money every month without asking for your permission or your feelings. The secret is automating the one decision you need to make — invest regularly — so that your emotional human brain never gets a chance to interfere.

The Real Reason SIPs Work: Removing You From the Equation

This is perhaps the deepest truth about SIP investing, and it’s humbling: the less involved you are in day-to-day decisions, the better your outcomes are likely to be. You are not the asset. Your discipline is.

A SIP works because it bypasses the most unreliable component of any investment strategy — the investor’s emotions. You don’t have to feel motivated on the 5th of every month. You don’t have to agree with where the market is going. You don’t have to be confident in the economy, the government, or the global situation. The money moves automatically, the units get purchased automatically, and compounding happens automatically.

Your only job is to not cancel it.

That’s it. That is the entire strategy. Do not cancel the SIP. That’s the whole secret. If a mutual fund salesman told you this on day one, they’d be out of a job in a week — but it’s the truth, and it’s powerful in its simplicity.