Prakash Uncle had been waiting to invest since 2019. He wasn’t lazy. He was waiting for the perfect dip, which, in his mind, was a market that fell exactly 20 percent on a Tuesday and then politely went up on Wednesday.
Whenever the market rose, he said it was too expensive. Whenever it fell, he said it might fall more. His nephew Aman, who had started a ₹3,000 SIP in the same year, kept quiet at family dinners and let the statements do the talking.
One evening Aman showed him a simple table on his phone. The SIP had never been timed once, yet it had quietly built a corpus bigger than Uncle’s savings account interest of five years.
Uncle studied it for a long time. “So you never guessed the dip?” he asked. “I guessed nothing,” said Aman. “I just paid on the fifth of every month.”
Uncle started a SIP the next day, on the fifth, naturally. He still says he is waiting for a dip to increase it. Aman says that is fine, because the dip, like Uncle’s patience, has a habit of arriving late.