I believe everyone has a story that helps someone else reflect. We tend to look up to celebrities for inspiration, but honestly, ordinary people’s stories resonate more, because our lifestyles, our mistakes, our salaries look nothing like theirs.
So today, instead of talking numbers first, I want to walk you through twenty one years of decisions. Some smart. Several genuinely bad. All of them part of the same slow education nobody formally gave me.
2005 — The Dream Salary That Wasn’t Much
I started my corporate journey with TCS in 2005, at ₹1.96 lakh per annum. For an average, mediocre student like me, that felt like a dream number. I didn’t come from a poor family, my grandfather had built a successful business, but my parents raised me to be humble and never show off. That upbringing shaped almost every money decision that followed.
2006 — The Nokia N72 Lesson
I bought a Nokia N72 for around ₹16,000. It remains the most I’ve ever spent on a phone, even today. I felt proud for about a week. Then the pride quietly faded. That was my first real lesson in consumption: things you buy lose their charm fast, and you’re often left wondering why you didn’t spend a fraction of that and felt almost the same joy.
2006–2010 — Onsite, a Flat, and a Mistake Called LIC
Between 2006 and 2010, I got six months onsite in the UK and two months in the USA. I was saving purely through my company provident fund, nothing more sophisticated than that. In 2008, using part of my UK earnings plus a ₹3 lakh home loan from HDFC, I bought a 2BHK flat in Kolkata’s New Town for ₹6.5 lakh.
That same year, I also started an LIC premium of ₹20,000 a year, partly because I genuinely believed it was an investment, partly because relatives pushed me into it. I later understood this as one of my biggest financial mistakes. An LIC premium is insurance, not investment, and nobody had told me term insurance even existed as an alternative.
2010 — A Simple Wedding, No Show
I got married in 2010 and spent ₹60,000 on the wedding, funded through some personal savings and 80000 personal loan. No pre-wedding shoot. The videographer cost ₹3,000, and I still have those memories saved in Google Drive today. Our honeymoon budget took us to Vizag, nothing extravagant, but it didn’t need to be.
2010–2012 — Renting, Traveling, and Building Nothing But Memories
We moved into a rented 2BHK in New Town, paying ₹8,000 a month. Apart from provident fund contributions, I wasn’t saving anything meaningful. But we traveled a lot, Darjeeling, Meghalaya, Bhutan. Looking back, those trips remain some of the most precious moments of that period, even though my bank balance would have told a very different story.
2012 — The Decision I Still Call My Biggest Mistake
I left TCS (₹7.2 lakh salary) and joined Ericsson (₹9.5 lakh). At the time, I was holding seven offer letters and had already secured H1B approval, with my TCS manager pushing hard to retain me for an immediate US opportunity. But my promotion to Assistant Consultant had been put on hold, and out of pure ego, I stuck to my resignation instead of taking the US opportunity.
That decision cost me the onsite move at a time when it would have mattered most, my parents weren’t aged yet, the window was open, and I let ego close it. If there’s one lesson I’d underline in this entire journey, it’s this one: don’t let a bruised ego override a genuinely good opportunity.
2013 — A 1BHK, Volunteer Provident Fund, and My First SIP
Six months into Ericsson, I was sent to Vietnam for three months onsite. I decided to buy a 1BHK flat for ₹13 lakh to avoid future rent, paying 20% down and the rest via a ₹15,000 EMI. Around the same time, I began maximizing my Voluntary Provident Fund, which was quietly compounding at 8%.
I also started a SIP of ₹5,000 in 2013, nudged by a mutual fund agent. I understood almost nothing about it. There was no formal financial education back then, not in schools, not around me. But I let it run. That single, half-informed decision would end up being one of the most important ones of my life, though I wouldn’t understand why for another decade.
2015 — A Modest Car and a New Kind of Pressure
I bought my first car, a Hyundai EON, for ₹3.5 lakh, deliberately the second-lowest priced model available. I didn’t want luxury, I wanted a low, manageable budget. I still maintain that same car in India today, no upgrades since.
My son was also born in 2015, and real financial pressure began. I could barely save anything for a while. Fortunately, my first 2BHK flat, the one I’d bought back in 2008, was finally handed over after seven years, and we moved in. I immediately rented out my 1BHK for ₹6,000 a month, my first real taste of passive income.
2016–2017 — Onsite Trips That Paid Off Loans
A two-month onsite stint in Jamaica and Trinidad helped fund my son’s rice ceremony back in the village. In 2017, three months onsite in Chile let me pay off both my first home and car loans. That same year, I had offers from Oracle, Walmart, and Accenture, including a ₹28 lakh package from Walmart, but I wasn’t willing to leave Kolkata. Looking back, I count it as a second questionable call, though luck meant it didn’t cost me much.
2019 — The Move That Changed Everything
In 2019, I got my first long-term onsite posting to the USA. I wasn’t eager to leave Kolkata again, but my son had started developing asthma issues linked to pollution, and that pushed me to finally make the bold move. This is really where my actual investment journey began.
The YesBank Scare
With zero real investing knowledge, I opened an NRI fixed deposit with YesBank, ₹10 lakh. Then YesBank ran into serious trouble, and my deposit was suddenly at risk. It was a genuine nightmare. The government eventually stepped in and the bank stabilized, but I learned the hard way that deposit insurance only covers ₹5 lakh per bank in case of default. I withdrew half of it the moment things normalized. I also started contributing the full ₹1.5 lakh annual limit to SBI PF.
2020 — COVID, YouTube, and the Real Education Begins
The pandemic crashed the markets, and that’s when things shifted for me. A friend pointed me to a Pranjal Kamra video on YouTube. Before that, I’d opened a couple of trading accounts and dabbled in short-term trading, without making any meaningful money. I was searching for something that could realistically beat inflation, something around 10% returns, sustainably.
Pranjal Kamra and Ankur Warikoo’s content gave me the answer: long-term investing in stocks and mutual funds, not trading, not speculation. That’s when my real interest in investing and the FIRE movement took hold. I read voraciously. Saurabh Mukherjee’s “Coffee Can Investing” was a genuine turning point, the idea of buying quality and simply not touching it for years.
2022 Onward — Going Global
After moving to Canada as a local employee in 2022, I started investing in the US and Canadian markets through Wealthsimple. I’ve barely touched my India stock and mutual fund portfolio since 2021, letting it run untouched. Today my portfolio spans Indian stocks, Indian mutual funds, metals, Indian real estate, Canadian pension accounts (RRSP, TFSA, DPSP), cash, fixed deposits, PPF, bonds, US equities, Canadian equities, and NPS.
The Number That Says It All
Before 2019, whatever I’d saved, mostly fixed deposits and real estate, has compounded roughly seven times since. Compounding isn’t a slogan. It’s the single most real force I’ve experienced in twenty years of working. If you don’t understand it, you end up paying the price to someone who does.
What I Never Did
No penny stocks. No futures and options trading, beyond a small test amount just to understand how it works, and never with money that mattered. No news-driven stock picks. I stayed almost entirely in high-quality stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and metal ETFs. My philosophy is buy and hold to compound.
Where the Numbers Landed
| Portfolio | CAGR |
|---|---|
| Indian stocks | ~14% (roughly tracking Nifty 50) |
| Indian mutual funds | ~15% (beat Nifty 50, trailed Nifty Midcap 150) |
| US & Canada stocks | ~18.5% (without leverage or outsized risk) |
Here’s how everything actually breaks down across asset classes, in one household view, spanning India, the US, and Canada:
| Asset Class | Overall Profit % | Invested Alloc % | Current Alloc % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mutual Funds | +119.56% | 7.19% | 12.08% |
| Real Estate | +207.22% | 5.73% | 13.47% |
| Equity (Canada) | +62.14% | 4.85% | 6.01% |
| Equity (India) | +59.51% | 5.21% | 6.36% |
| Equity (USA) | +48.75% | 12.41% | 14.12% |
| Precious Metals | +45.72% | 3.83% | 4.27% |
| Fixed Deposit (India) | +7.80% | 10.10% | 8.32% |
| NPS (India) | +1.06% | 0.97% | 0.75% |
| Retirement (Overseas) | +42% | 27.52% | 21.05% |
| Liquid & Cash | 0% | 15.00% | 11.47% |
| Other Assets | -61.76% | 7.20% | 2.11% |
A few things stand out when I look at this laid flat like this. Real estate and mutual funds are the two biggest movers, up 207% and 119% respectively, and both have quietly grown their share of the total pie well beyond what I originally put in. Overseas retirement accounts remain my single largest allocation at 21%, even though they show zero unrealized gain here, because they’re reported at contribution value, not market growth, a reminder that a big slice of real wealth is invisible if you only look at “returns.”
And then there’s “Other Assets,” down 61.76%. I’m keeping that number in this table on purpose. Not every bet works. This is a useful, honest counterweight to an otherwise strong table, and proof that diversification means accepting some assets will lag or lose, while the disciplined majority carries the portfolio forward.But thankfully this is my car value in India and Canada. I bought old Car in 2022 in Canada and am still driving it, clearing its loan in 2 years.
Most importantly, I am debt-free. My credit score is excellent in India and Canada.
What I’d Tell My 2005 Self
Protect your capital first. Growth follows. Every mistake on this list, the LIC premium, the ego-driven resignation, the YesBank scare, cost me time or money I can never fully get back. But every quiet, boring decision, the SIP I barely understood, the provident fund I kept maxing, the flat I refused to upgrade unnecessarily, is what actually built this.
If there’s one thing I hope you take from this story, it’s not the returns table. It’s that financial education doesn’t arrive neatly packaged. Mine came from YouTube videos, a scared bank withdrawal, an ego I had to unlearn, and twenty years of simply not quitting on the boring stuff.
In my whole pathway, my wife strongly supported me in every decision and without her and my parents’ blessings, I would be nothing. I hope I will instill some values in my son that I inherited from my family upbringing.
What’s the one financial decision in your life you’d do completely differently if you could go back?