Widely read:
Anand Kumar/AI-Generated Image
Summary: Separating money by purpose sounds simple until you try doing it with a modern investment portfolio. Readers embraced the principle, then ran into practical questions no spreadsheet or app seemed to answer. This story follows what happened next.
The responses to Dhirendra Kumar’s latest Editor’s Note, Protect your goals from yourself, arrived with an unusual quality. Readers were not arguing with the note or pushing back on its logic. They were recognising something, in their own homes, in their own childhood almirahs, in their own poorly tagged portfolios and writing in about it.
That recognition was the defining texture of the week's mail.
The image they already knew
The cloth bag in the almirah is a specific image. It works on readers the way specific images usually do: it unlocks memory rather than merely engaging the intellect. Nandkumar J wrote about his father at TELCO in Jamshedpur, a company of 30,000 people in an era when salary arrived in physical envelopes. Officers received theirs on the first of the month, workers on the tenth. The envelopes came home through the colony without fear of being mugged, were placed in the Godrej almirah, and immediately distributed: the grocer, the milkman, the newspaper vendor, the laundryman. What remained after clearing those claims was rarely more than 5-10 per cent. Major expenses like education or weddings meant borrowing against the Provident Fund. There was no investment strategy. There was only the almirah.
Shanmuga Krishnamurthy encountered the same logic from a different direction. His family's lawyer, an elderly man sharp for his age, described in detail how his wife had been running the household with multiple bags for 50 years. When Krishnamurthy mentioned the modern term "bucket system," the lawyer was unmoved. The concept had existed long before the name arrived to dignify it.
What both letters share is the point that the system worked not because the people using it had thought carefully about portfolio theory, but because they had not merged everything into one pool to begin with. The drawstring was never a financial strategy. It was a domestic habit. And domestic habits are harder to break than strategies.
The one reader who did the test
The note ended with a 10-minute challenge: open whatever you use to track your investments, find the money meant for your child's education and point at the actual holdings. Sukanya Hazarika did it.
What she found was a gap. Not in her intention, which had always been serious, but in the scale of what she had actually set aside. The audit showed that her existing investments were not sufficient to cover what she projected her children would need, whether they studied in India or chose to go abroad. She had been investing. She had not been saving enough for that specific purpose. The two things look identical until you do the arithmetic.
She responded by opening two dedicated mid-cap funds tagged strictly to her children's education, adding to existing Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana investments. The money in those funds has a single unmistakable job. She described it as pulling the drawstring shut: the goal is defined, the boundary is clear and the compounding has a purpose it cannot be borrowed from.
Then she did something rarer. She turned the same honesty on the rest of her portfolio and found that it still lacked the same separation. "Whenever I want to plan a trip to New Zealand," she wrote, "I am left scratching my head: should this come out of my liquid savings or my goal-less portfolio?" She had solved the problem for one goal. She had named the problem for all the others.
Beyond the note
The note made the case for goal separation clearly enough that several readers came away wanting to do it and immediately ran into a practical wall: how, exactly?
Soumya Dey asked whether a separate Excel sheet for each SIP tagged to a specific goal was the right approach and whether Fund Advisor had a tool for it. Shashank Shukla, who said he had recommended Value Research to dozens of people specifically for this kind of goal-based tracking, pointed out that the portfolio labelling feature on the platform had recently been disabled. The option that allowed users to tag holdings to different goals had been blocked from accepting new entries. The note was asking readers to do something that the platform it comes from was no longer supporting. Umesh M C made the same point more directly: the note advocates precisely what the current Value Research tool cannot be used for. He had reverted to a personal Excel file that only he can decipher, stored in his email under documents and available to his family only if they know where to look.
This is the practical friction that sits between the principle and the behaviour it is trying to change. The drawstring image is vivid. The mechanism for creating a drawstring across a modern portfolio spread across platforms, asset classes and institutions is not yet obvious to most readers.
Jitendra Bakshi offered a more experienced view: in the early years of an investment journey, goal separation is what builds the habit and gives each rupee a clear identity. Once the corpus grows and the investor matures, a large enough pool can fund any goal on demand without formal segregation between accounts. The separation is scaffolding, useful for building the structure, not permanent architecture. But that perspective is available only to someone who has already built the corpus. For the reader at the beginning, the scaffolding is exactly what is needed.
Ranganatha Thirumalai Krishnamurthy pointed out that this is also what the Provident Fund was designed to do at an institutional level: ring-fence retirement savings from the working self who might find a better use for the money today. Deductions at source, employer contributions going directly to the fund and withdrawal restrictions were all versions of the same drawstring. His concern was that liberalising withdrawal rules is undoing the mechanism that gave the system its power.
The young earner's honest question
Swapnil Bhardwaj is saving 60 per cent of his income and investing all of it in mutual funds through SIPs. Recently his friends went to Thailand. He stayed behind because everything was invested. He is not resentful about this but he is asking a genuine question: at what point does the discipline of saving become a form of self-denial that extracts more than it builds? He is also thinking about a car and a house and is aware, painfully, that Rs 1 lakh saved today could compound to Rs 8 lakh in 15 years. That awareness is a compelling reason never to spend anything at all. He ended with a question that carried no irony in it: "Am I a miser?"
The note did not address this directly, but it contains the answer. The drawstring system was never about maximising the amount saved at all times. It was about protecting specific goals from each other and from the self that will always find a plausible reason to redeploy funds. A holiday is a legitimate goal. It deserves its own small pouch. The problem is not that Swapnil wants to go to Thailand. The problem is that his money has no bag labelled Thailand and so the entire portfolio presents itself as a single resource that must be defended at all times against all claims.
The week's responses, taken together, described a note that landed clearly on the right emotion. The almirah image gave people a way of thinking about what their investments were for. The 10-minute test gave them a way of finding out whether the thinking had been converted into action. A number of readers discovered, when they actually tried to point at the holdings, that they could not. Sukanya Hazarika found she could point at some and not others, which is probably the most common result and the most useful one to report.
Credits
Nandkumar J, Shanmuga Krishnamurthy, Sukanya Hazarika, Soumya Dey, Shashank Shukla, Umesh M C, Jitendra Bakshi, Ranganatha Thirumalai Krishnamurthy, Swapnil Bhardwaj
Also read: Agreed on the AI bubble. Now what?
This article was originally published on July 28, 2026.
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