He started with ‘very bad’ mutual funds, yet built Rs 1 crore corpus at 29

For three years that portfolio grew slowly, on SIPs of Rs 5,000 to Rs 15,000 a month. Then, in 2022, a friend told him what he had managed to save. It was around Rs 60 lakh.

The number did not inspire him so much as measure him. “It made me look at my own financial progress and ask myself whether I was doing enough,” he says. “I realised that earning a salary was not the same as building wealth.”

Four years on, Aarav is 29 and his portfolio has crossed Rs 1 crore. He kept almost all of those early funds, the “bad” ones included. And by his own contribution history, more than 85% of every rupee he has ever invested went in after that conversation.

His is the latest story in ‘Everyday Crorepatis‘, Financial Express Digital’s series on Indians who turned an ordinary salary into serious money. It is also the first in which the turning point was someone else’s savings.

The uncomfortable engine

Earlier in this series I wrote about people with very different starting points. One of them supported two retired parents while assembling his first crore. One watched a single platform change its rules and erase his entire income overnight. One reached Rs 9 crore by 32 and still insists his returns were nothing special.

What pushed each of them was something you could say out loud at a dinner table. Discipline. Family duty. The memory of a business that failed.

Aarav’s push came from comparison, which is the one motivation every personal finance column tells you to avoid. It is supposed to push you into a friend’s portfolio rather than your own plan.

What he did with it was different, and this is the part worth copying. He did not ask what his friend owned. He went and looked at his own spending instead.

“I started paying more attention to where my money was going,” he says. “Things such as gadgets, shoes, travel and eating out can take up a significant amount of money over time. I did not want to stop enjoying life, but I wanted to be more thoughtful.”

He kept the spending that mattered to him and cut what did not. The difference went into his SIPs.

Rs 5,000 to Rs 60,000 SIP journey

Aarav grew up in Bhopal in a middle-class family where money was respected but never really discussed as something you could grow. He finished a BSc in computer science in 2017, an MBA in 2019, and went into sales in the agro-processing industry. He is now based in Indore.

His first salary was about Rs 5.4 lakh a year. It is now around Rs 28 lakh, a little over five times in seven years.

His monthly investment went up faster.

That is a twelve-fold increase in eight years, against a salary that rose five times. In 2019 his SIP took about 11% of his gross pay. Today it takes roughly 26%.

He did not simply let his investments drift upward with his income. He deliberately gave up a growing share of a growing salary, which is far harder, because every raise arrives with a ready-made list of things it could buy instead.

“I did not want my spending to rise every time my salary increased,” he says.

What the portfolio actually holds

His Rs 1 crore breaks into three parts.

Look at the top line, because it does not match the way he describes himself

Asked why he chose mutual funds, Aarav gives the answer most working professionals give. “I could invest a fixed amount every month instead of trying to identify individual stocks.” He talks about his money almost entirely in the language of SIPs and funds.

Yet his single largest holding is direct equity, and it is slightly ahead of his entire mutual fund portfolio.

There is no contradiction in owning both. What is interesting is the gap between the story and the statement. He began as an SIP investor, that frame stuck, and his portfolio quietly became something broader while the description stayed where it started. Anyone who has not opened their own consolidated statement in a while should take the hint.

The mutual fund math

The fund leg is the part we can examine properly, because he shared his full contribution history when he spoke exclusively to the Financial Express Digital.

Adding up every instalment on that ladder from 2019 to date gives roughly Rs 25 lakh of contributions, now worth about Rs 37 lakh. That is a gain of around Rs 12 lakh, and it implies an annual return somewhere near 15%, which is a reasonable outcome for diversified Indian equity funds over this stretch and nothing more exotic than that.

Two thirds of that corpus is money he put in. One third is growth.

Which is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes a crore at 29 requires finding a spectacular fund. It did not. It required a large, rising, uninterrupted contribution into an ordinary one.

The funds he got wrong, and kept

Aarav is candid about his early investment mistakes. “My early investments were poorly planned and some funds were very bad at that point of time but they taught me that fund performance can change over time,” he says.

Asked whether those early picks eventually helped, he is blunt. “Almost all of them, as I kept them despite ups and downs in the market. Looking at the final value now, I think I did well.”

He is careful not to turn that into a rule, and he is right to be. In the same breath he adds that you should not keep a fund simply because you already own it, and that you need to understand why something is underperforming before deciding. Those two instincts sit in tension, and he has not fully resolved them. Very few investors have.

His own summary is the sharpest line in this entire conversation. “Regular investing and choosing the right investments are two different things. Starting an SIP is a good habit, but you also need to understand the fund.”

The framework worth copying

Aarav is 29, unmarried, with no dependants and a career still climbing. His advantages are real and worth naming: no family debt, no one relying on his salary, and seven years of unusually fast income growth in a sales career.

Strip those away and three things still travel.

The first is the ladder. Rs 5,000 is not a serious amount of money in 2019 or any other year. It became serious because it was raised six times in eight years, faster than the salary behind it.

The second is when he made his mistakes. His poorly planned picks came early, when the sums were small: in his first three years he invested less than Rs 3.5 lakh in total. Learning on Rs 5,000 a month costs far less than learning on Rs 60,000.

The third is what he did with an uncomfortable feeling. A friend’s number made him feel behind, and instead of chasing that friend’s portfolio, he went home and audited his own.

Comparison made him look. What he looked at was his own spending, not somebody else’s returns. That distinction is the whole difference between a conversation that ruins your decisions and one that corrects them.

Disclaimer: This article is based on the personal financial journey, disclosures and projections shared by the individual featured in the story. Future corpus estimates, pension calculations and retirement projections are based on the assumptions provided by the individual, including expected investment returns, prevailing tax laws and current NPS/PPF rules, all of which are subject to change. Pension amounts will depend on the final corpus, annuity rates available at the time of retirement and applicable tax rules. The PPF interest rate is notified by the government every quarter and may change over time.

This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment, tax or financial planning advice, or as an endorsement of any investment strategy. Readers should assess their own financial goals, risk appetite and consult a qualified financial or tax adviser before making investment or retirement planning decisions.

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