Widely read:
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Summary: Readers didn't find the argument about savings rate new. Several had already seen it lived out—by a father who walked to work, a grandfather who built a corpus from a pension, a Tata Steel employee on Rs 35 a month. The math confirms what they already knew. The most memorable letter came from someone who resolved the question while writing in.
The responses to the latest Editor’s Note by Dhirendra Kumar, Stop fussing over where to invest, arrived in two broad waves. The first came from readers who recognised the argument not because it was new but because they had already seen it play out, through a parent or a grandparent who had understood it long before any column put it into a formula. The second came from readers still working out what to do with it. The most memorable letter in the entire mailbox came from someone who resolved that question while writing in.
What the elders already knew
The column made a mathematical argument: saving rate matters more than return rate, especially in the early years. Several readers wrote to say the same truth had reached them well before the math did, through a person rather than a formula.
Swaminathan Ramachandran, 74, wrote about his father. A middle-class central government employee, he supported six children and two elders in the house, made all of them graduates and post-graduates, funded the weddings of five daughters with cash, gold and jewellery, donated generously to hospitals, schools and temples across Chennai, and walked to work. He saved in Sundaram Finance fixed deposits and nothing else. No equity, no complexity. Just the consistent accumulation of a man who spent less than he earned every month for decades. Swaminathan's Ahmedabad friend Tushar Mehta had a formula for this approach that Swaminathan quoted in full: income minus saving equals expenditure. Not the other way around. "His advice is to save nothing less than 30 per cent of any income," Swaminathan wrote. He ended his letter with a dig from Mehta at his south Indian friends, who crack GMAT, teach at IIM Ahmedabad and end up working for Gujarati and Marwari companies. The point, affectionately made, was about who accumulates and who earns.
Nandkumar J recalled advice from a gentleman who had joined Tata Steel in 1935 on a salary of Rs 35 a month. His golden rule, distilled from a long working life: "It's not how much you earn, it's how much you save." Nandkumar added his own observation to this: as your salary rises, the savings percentage should rise alongside it. The corpus grows not because of brilliant allocation but because the habit of saving compounds with the income that feeds it.
Akshay Kharbanda is 31 and works at a consulting company. His father died when he was three years old. His grandparents raised him and his brother, leaving them properties, shares and fixed deposits built from a pension and a lifetime of deliberate, careful living. The frugality was not only a financial inheritance. It was a behavioural one, passed down through years of watching people who understood, before any column said so, that how much you keep matters more than what you do with it. He now saves Rs 75,000 to Rs 80,000 a month in mutual funds and is thinking about how to multiply what his grandparents built. His questions about strategy were less interesting than the thing he said without quite meaning to: that the habit was already installed, long before he had any income to apply it to.
The behaviour change that happened in real time
Among all the responses, one stood out for its immediacy. This was the letter I mentioned at the start.
Ankit Gupta had been meaning to increase his SIP for more than two years. The reason he had not done so was precisely the trap the column described. His home renovation was ongoing, he had made a poor pick with a mid-cap fund some years back, and he could not find the time to decide which fund deserved the additional money. The deliberation had cost him two years of higher contributions. He described all of this and then added a sentence that stays with you: "Looks like, I will still just go ahead and invest in some index fund today itself!"
There is no mathematical simulation that captures what that sentence is worth. The fund he chose is almost beside the point.
Pema Bhutia provided the real-world proof the column's arithmetic was pointing toward. She has been steadily increasing her monthly SIP, which now stands at around Rs 40,000 a month. "Due to which I am able to generate good returns even in this sideways market," she wrote. The sideways market is doing its unremarkable work. So is the habit.
Debendra Nath Panigrahi offered the simplest summary of why the column's argument matters in practice. "Procrastination is the biggest enemy of the investor. Once the investors start saving and investing, 50 per cent of the problem is solved." The fund choice is the other 50 per cent, perhaps. But it keeps getting the first 100 per cent of the attention.
The pushback and the harder questions
Not every response was in agreement, and two readers pushed in directions worth taking seriously.
Suresh Kalra wrote with genuine frustration. He has been investing in mutual funds for a long time. His returns, he said, have been far inferior to what advisors promise. He raised specific doubts: too many funds to choose from, the phrase "long term" deployed so vaguely that nobody can be held to account for it, and a suspicion that consistent advice to invest in equity and stay put amounts to marketing for the mutual fund industry dressed as financial wisdom.
It is a challenge that deserves a direct response. The column's argument was not that equity returns are guaranteed or that any particular fund will perform as shown in a fact sheet. It was the narrower claim that, within sensible choices, the savings rate matters more than the fund choice. A person saving Rs 20,000 a month in a dull, average fund for 10 years is likely better off than one saving Rs 12,000 a month in a carefully chosen one.
Nilesh Kankariya raised the mirror image of the savings question. He wanted the column to spend some energy on earning more, not only on the discipline of spending less. It is a fair point. The column treated income as a given and savings as the variable. For younger readers especially, the most powerful lever may be increasing income rather than trimming expenses. Saving a higher percentage of a larger number beats saving a higher percentage of a stagnant one.
Srinivas Shenoy named the cultural headwind against which this advice runs every day. "Live today, tomorrow may never come seems to be the overbearing vibe of the times," he wrote. With social media constantly surfacing what others are buying and consuming, saving looks less like wisdom and more like self-denial. "Making money is considered clever, not setting aside money." He is describing something real. The column made the mathematical case for saving more. Whether the mathematics can compete with the feed is a different question.
The responses, taken together, told a story the column could only imply. The readers who had absorbed the lesson earliest had done so not through a formula or a magazine article but through a person: a father who walked to work, a grandfather who built a corpus from a pension, an old Tata Steel gentleman with a salary of Rs 35 a month and a principle that outlasted the salary by decades.
The math confirms what they already knew. The math is useful. But it is the person who makes the habit stick.
Credits
Swaminathan Ramachandran, Nandkumar J, Akshay Kharbanda, Ankit Gupta, Pema Bhutia, Debendra Nath Panigrahi, Suresh Kalra, Nilesh Kankariya, Srinivas Shenoy
Also read: RBI named 11 tricks banks play on us. Readers had lived them
This article was originally published on July 07, 2026.
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