Ask ten people why they haven’t started a SIP yet, and you’ll get ten different reasons. But sit with those reasons for a while, and they tend to fall into the same three shapes — three quiet, reasonable-sounding excuses that Paresh hears on repeat, in almost every client conversation, across every age group. Underneath each one is the same hidden number: the cost of delaying SIP by even a handful of years, which is far larger than most people ever sit down to calculate.
Here are three of those excuses, in the words of the people who lived them.
“I’ll Start When the Market Feels Right” — Karan’s Story
Karan Sheth is 30 now, and runs the export desk at his family’s textile trading firm near Ring Road, Surat. At 25, a colleague showed him a SIP calculator on his phone during lunch break — ₹15,000 a month, invested consistently till 60, could realistically grow into a corpus of around ₹10 crore. Karan remembers being impressed. He also remembers thinking: markets are a bit high right now, let me wait for a correction and enter at a better level.
That correction came a year later. Karan was busy with a shipment crisis and didn’t act. Another dip came two years after that — this time he was saving for a family function. By the time we sit across from him at 30, he has watched at least four “good entry points” pass by, each time with a legitimate-sounding reason to wait just a little longer. Rupee cost averaging — the mechanism that makes a SIP buy more units when prices fall and fewer when they rise — exists specifically to remove this exact guessing game, though Karan didn’t fully register that at the time.
What Karan didn’t realise is that a SIP isn’t a bet on entering at the right level at all — it’s a tool built so you never have to guess. Every month, some units get bought high, some get bought low, and the average smooths itself out over years. The “right time” he was waiting for wasn’t a market condition. It was simply the day he decided to start.
That day just arrived five years later than it needed to — and the ₹15,000 SIP his 25-year-old self could have run is now, at 30, a ₹28,000 SIP required to reach the exact same ₹10 crore by 60. This is the cost of delaying SIP in its purest form: the five years he spent “waiting for the market” didn’t protect his money, they simply cost him the time the market itself would have used to compound it.
“I’ll Start Once Things Settle Down” — Meera’s Story
Meera, 32, works in Adajan and got married five years ago. Her reason for not starting a SIP has never been indifference — it’s timing, in a different sense than Karan’s. At 27, it was the wedding and the expenses around it. At 29, it was setting up the new home. At 31, it was the home loan EMI that had just started, and the promise she made herself: once this settles a bit, I’ll start investing seriously.
The trouble with “once things settle down” is that it rarely arrives as a clean, empty calendar date. There’s always a plausible next reason — a school admission, a car replacement, a parent’s medical need — because life doesn’t pause to let you catch up. Meera wasn’t being careless. She was managing real, competing priorities, the way most people genuinely do.
But every year she waited for total breathing room was a year that quietly needed a larger SIP to reach the same goal, because the years themselves — not the money — were what compounding needed most. That gap is the cost of delaying SIP most people never see coming, because it grows silently in the background of an otherwise responsible financial life.
When Meera finally sat down and ran the numbers, the moment that stayed with her wasn’t the size of the gap. It was realising she didn’t need her finances to “settle” before starting — she needed the SIP itself to be the thing that helped them settle. She started with an amount that fit around her existing EMI, not one that waited for the EMI to end.
“₹5,000 Won’t Make a Difference, I’ll Wait Till I Can Do It Properly” — Rakesh’s Story
Rakesh, 38, owns a small manufacturing unit on the outskirts of Surat. His excuse is the quietest of the three, and in some ways the most common among business owners: he could have started a modest SIP years ago, but a small number felt almost embarrassing next to the scale of his business decisions. He kept telling himself he’d start “properly” once cash flow was strong and stable enough to commit a serious amount — ₹50,000, maybe ₹1 lakh a month, done right, all at once.
That “properly” moment kept receding. Business cash flow is rarely perfectly stable for a small manufacturer, and waiting for a flawless month to commit a large SIP meant, in practice, waiting indefinitely.
By the time Rakesh actually sat down with real numbers at 38, the maths were blunt: to reach the same ₹10 crore corpus by 60, he now needs to invest close to ₹1,00,000 a month for just 20-odd years — nearly seven times the ₹15,000 a 25-year-old would have needed, for a shorter runway and less room for the ordinary bumps of a business cycle to be absorbed along the way.
The hardest part of that conversation wasn’t the number. It was Rakesh realising that a ₹5,000 SIP started at 30, left running quietly for a decade, would likely have outgrown the impressive-sounding lump sum he kept postponing. Small and early had beaten large and “proper” the entire time — he just hadn’t run the comparison. If you want to see what restarting looks like after a long gap like his, Restarting Your SIP After Stopping walks through that exact rebuild, step by step.
The Pattern Behind All Three Excuses
Karan waited for the market. Meera waited for stability. Rakesh waited for scale. Three different lives, three different-sounding reasons — but underneath, the same psychological trick was at play: each delay felt completely reasonable in the moment it was made, because the cost of delaying SIP is invisible day to day. Nobody feels five years disappear. You only see what it cost when someone runs the numbers next to you, on a specific date, in a specific room.
This is simply how humans are wired to think about money — the discomfort of committing today is immediate and real, while the cost of delay is distant and abstract, right up until it isn’t. Recognising this pattern is often more useful than any calculator, because it’s the pattern, not the excuse, that repeats. If you’re building your first SIP from scratch rather than restarting one, our broader guide on mutual fund investment in Surat is a useful starting point alongside this one.
The Cost of Delaying SIP — In One Table
| Age SIP Starts | Years Invested (to 60) | Monthly SIP Needed | Corpus at 60 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 (Karan’s missed start) | 35 years | ₹15,000 | ~₹10 crore |
| 30 (Karan today / Meera’s ideal start) | 30 years | ₹28,000 | ~₹10 crore |
| 40 (Rakesh’s “proper” start) | 20 years | ₹1,00,000 | ~₹10 crore |
Illustrative figures assuming ~12% annual returns, for conceptual comparison only — actual mutual fund returns are market-linked and not guaranteed. Industry-wide, this is exactly why SIP contributions have climbed to record monthly highs across India in recent years, as more investors trade the search for a perfect entry point for simple consistency.
Think of it like planting a fruit tree. A tree planted five years ago is already bearing fruit today, almost without effort. A tree planted today needs those same five years, no matter how much better the soil or how much more attention you give it later. There’s no way to buy back the growing years. The only real choice is: plant it now, or explain to yourself in five years why you didn’t.
If You Saw Yourself in Karan, Meera, or Rakesh
None of these three needed a perfect market entry, a fully settled life, or a large “proper” amount to begin. What they actually needed was permission to start small and imperfect — and the confidence that small and early would outperform large and late, which the maths above bears out every time. This is the part of the cost of delaying SIP that’s actually good news: the fix costs far less than the problem.
If today is the day you’re reading this instead of just scrolling past it, that’s already the hardest part done. The next part is smaller than it feels: pick a number you can genuinely sustain, even if it’s modest, and let the SIP mandate do the rest without needing your daily attention or a perfect month to launch it in. For a wider look at how SIPs fit into a full investment plan, see our guide on SIP and mutual fund investing in Surat.
- Pick a monthly SIP amount you can sustain for at least 3 years without touching it — not the “ideal” number from a calculator, the real one your cash flow can carry.
- Set the SIP date right after your salary or business inflow, not at month-end when funds are already thin.
- Choose a step-up SIP if your income is likely to grow, so the gap narrows automatically each year instead of needing a big manual decision later.
- Keep this SIP separate from short-term goals (wedding, car, home down payment) — mixing timelines is the most common reason SIPs get redeemed early.
- Review the amount once a year, not once a month. SIPs are built to be left alone, not watched.
“In three and a half years of doing this full-time, I’ve noticed the excuse always changes — the market, the EMI, the ‘I’ll do it properly later’ — but the outcome is the same every time. Nobody has ever regretted starting a SIP too small. Plenty of people regret waiting for the perfect moment to start a big one.” — Paresh Chaudhary, Founder, Shree Radha Financial Services (SR Wealth)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it too late to start a SIP at 38 or 40?
No — but as Rakesh’s numbers show, the monthly commitment needed for the same corpus rises sharply. Starting later usually means adjusting the target amount, the monthly SIP, or leaning more on equity for longer to recover ground. It’s never too late to start; it’s only costlier to start later.
Should I wait for a market correction before starting my SIP?
This is exactly the trap Karan was in. A SIP is designed to work through market ups and downs automatically through rupee cost averaging — trying to time the “right” entry usually means waiting indefinitely, since nobody can reliably predict market bottoms in advance. Waiting for the right moment is, in practice, one of the biggest contributors to the cost of delaying SIP.
I have EMIs and other commitments — can I really start a SIP alongside them?
Often yes, with a smaller amount than you’d imagine. Meera’s situation shows that a modest SIP running alongside existing commitments usually beats waiting for those commitments to fully end before starting.
Is a small SIP like ₹5,000 even worth starting?
Yes — Rakesh’s story is a direct illustration of this. A small SIP started early, left running consistently for a decade or more, regularly outperforms a much larger SIP started later, simply because of the extra years of compounding.
What if my income grows a lot after I start — should I have waited to start with a bigger number?
No. Start with what fits today, and use a step-up SIP to increase the amount as your income grows. This captures both the extra years of compounding now and the larger contributions later, instead of trading one for the other.
Ready to work out your own starting number — not Karan’s, not Meera’s, not Rakesh’s, but yours? Shree Radha Financial Services (SR Wealth) helps clients across Surat and Gujarat build a SIP plan sized to their actual income and goals.
If you’re also thinking beyond the SIP itself, our estate planning guide for Gujarat families covers what happens to this investment down the line.
📞 +91 98791 13255 | ✉️ shreeradha.services@gmail.com | 🌐 www.srwealth.co.in
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About the Author: Paresh Chaudhary is the founder of Shree Radha Financial Services (SR Wealth), an AMFI Registered Mutual Fund and SIF Distributor (ARN: 268390) and APMI Registered PMS Distributor (APRN: 05763) based in Surat, Gujarat. He also holds an IRDAI license for insurance solutions. Before founding SR Wealth roughly 3.5 years ago, he spent over 15 years at L&T. He is a mechanical engineering graduate of SVNIT Surat.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks; please read all scheme-related documents carefully. Shree Radha Financial Services (SR Wealth) is a distributor, not an investment advisor. The figures used are illustrative projections based on assumed rates of return and are not guaranteed outcomes. Names and details of Karan, Meera, and Rakesh are illustrative composites, not real client identities. Please consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.
