I started off like many others in India’s great IT rat race—armed with a basic laptop, caffeine dependency, and dreams of onsite opportunities. Life was mostly code, calls, and calculating how many years it would take to buy an iPhone without feeling guilty. After a few years of debugging other people’s code and slowly debugging my own life, I switched my career stream to something a bit more relaxing (read: fewer 2 AM deployments and more breathing room).
Fast forward to today: I'm about to hit 35, married, with one kid, working at a product-based company in Bangalore.
Here’s how the numbers look:
- Mutual Funds: ₹63 lakhs – SIPs became my religion after I understood compounding.
- Gold Bonds: ₹6 lakhs – Because my mother told me gold is always safe (and she’s usually right).
- NPS: ₹10 lakhs – Future me better be thankful.
- EPF: ₹13 lakhs – The silent warrior that kept growing in the background.
- Stocks: ₹9 lakhs – Some of them even went up. Miracles happen.
- RSUs/Company Stock: ₹36 lakhs – Thank you, product-based company overlords.
- Physical Gold: ₹5 lakhs – SGBs
But here’s the part I’m happiest about:
I’m debt-free.
No home loan, no car loan, no EMIs haunting me at 2 AM. That’s the real flex.
All this was built with a job in India. No foreign income, no secret side hustle selling banana chips on Zepto. Just regular salary, saving diligently, investing consistently, and resisting the urge to upgrade everything the moment I got a raise.
So if you’re in your 20s and wondering if it’s possible: yes, it is. You don’t need to be a genius. Just be consistent, be patient, and try not to buy a new iPhone every year. (Seriously, it helps.)
Edit: Removing my real estate component. Even though it is under my name, I have not ‘saved’ it. This dawned on me from some of the comments. Also removing the gold component that I have been passed on and including only the amount I have invested in gold.
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