Enter your SIP details to see how your wealth grows
Corpus projection and growth chart will appear here
Amount invested
—
Returns earned
—
Enter your target to find your monthly SIP
Your required SIP and return sensitivity will appear here
You will invest
—
Returns do the rest
—
What if returns change?
12%Cost of Waiting
Every 6 months you delay, your required SIP goes up.
Learn
A ₹5,000 monthly SIP for 20 years at 12% gives you ₹49.9 lakhs. You put in ₹12 lakhs. The remaining ₹37.9 lakhs came from compounding. That gap, between what you put in and what you get back, is what this page is really about.
A SIP, or Systematic Investment Plan, is a method of investing a fixed amount into a mutual fund at regular intervals, usually every month. You set it up once, and the amount gets auto-debited from your bank account on a chosen date each month.
The mutual fund uses your money to buy units at whatever the current NAV (Net Asset Value) is. When markets are down, your fixed amount buys more units. When markets are up, it buys fewer. Over time this averaging effect, called rupee cost averaging, reduces the risk of timing the market badly.
Compounding means your returns earn returns. In the early years of a SIP, most of your corpus is money you invested. But as time passes, the returns pile on top of previous returns, and the growth curve bends upward sharply.
This is why the chart on this page shows a curve, not a straight line. The acceleration in the later years is not because you invested more, but because compounding is doing heavier lifting. A 20-year SIP benefits from compounding far more than two 10-year SIPs put end to end.
The rule of thumb: In a long-term SIP at 12%, roughly the first half of your tenure grows your invested amount. The second half is where compounding takes over and does the heavy lifting.
This calculator defaults to 12% per year. For Indian equity mutual funds, long-term historical returns have typically ranged between 10% and 14% CAGR. 12% is a reasonable middle estimate for planning purposes, but it is not guaranteed.
Use the return slider in the reverse mode to test different assumptions. If markets deliver only 8%, how does your SIP need to change? If they deliver 15%, how early can you reach your goal? Planning for a range of outcomes is more useful than planning for one fixed number.
Consider two people both targeting ₹1 crore at age 60. One starts at 25 with a ₹5,000 SIP. The other starts at 35 with a ₹15,000 SIP. At 12% returns, the person who started at 25 gets there comfortably. The person who started at 35 is still short.
Ten years of delay cannot be compensated by tripling the monthly investment. This is not an exaggeration for effect, it is what the math produces. The Cost of Waiting section in this calculator shows you the same effect applied to your specific goal.
The simple version: Time in the market beats timing the market, and it also beats amount in the market beyond a point. Start small and early rather than large and late.
This calculator assumes a constant annual return. Real mutual fund returns fluctuate year to year. Some years will be strongly positive, some will be negative. The compounding formula used here models the long-run average behaviour, not year-by-year volatility.
It also does not account for exit load, expense ratio, or tax on redemption. For equity funds held over a year, long-term capital gains above ₹1 lakh are taxed at 10%. These reduce your effective corpus slightly. For financial planning, subtract 1 to 1.5 percentage points from your expected return to get a conservative net-of-costs figure.