I've been doing this since 2014, so I've now had enough conversations with people looking backwards to notice something. People spend weeks choosing between schemes. And in twelve years, not one person has sat across from me and said the problem was that they picked the wrong fund.
They regret other things, consistently, and it's the same short list every time. Worth writing down, because the list tells you where to put your attention today.
Regret one: starting late
This is first by a distance and it isn't close.
Somebody in their forties, doing fine, sitting with a portfolio that's perfectly reasonable, and the thing they mention is the decade in their twenties and thirties when they earned well and saved nothing in particular. Not badly. Just nothing deliberate.
What makes it sting is that it's the one thing that can't be fixed later. You can raise the amount, change the scheme, improve the paperwork. You can't get the years back, and our page on compounding explains why those particular years mattered more than the recent ones.
The version I hear most often is some form of "I kept meaning to". Not a bad decision. An absent one.
Regret two: stopping during a bad stretch
The second most common, and the one people are most reluctant to say out loud.
They stopped in a fall, waited for things to look better, and by the time things looked better the prices were higher. Sometimes they restarted a year or two later. Sometimes they never did, which our post on restarting a SIP you stopped is written for.
What's interesting is that almost nobody says "I should have picked a scheme that fell less". They say they should have kept going. They understood, afterwards, that the problem was their reaction rather than the holding.
Regret three: the amount was too small for too long
This one arrives quietly and it's the one I find most preventable.
Somebody started a modest instalment years ago, kept it faithfully, never missed a month, and never raised it either. Their income tripled. The instalment didn't move. So they did everything right except the one adjustment that was entirely within their control.
It's such an easy thing to fix that people find it painful in hindsight. Raising it on a schedule takes one instruction, as our page on the step-up SIP covers, and it does more than any selection decision I could have made for them.
Regret four: nobody else knew
This one isn't usually the investor's regret. It's the family's, and I hear it in a different kind of meeting.
Somebody has died, and the people sitting across from me are reconstructing what existed from bank statements. Sometimes there's a folio nobody knew about. Sometimes there's no nominee and a straightforward process becomes a long one. Our post on what happens afterwards covers the mechanics.
The investment choices in those cases are frequently fine. It's the absence of a list and a current nomination that costs the family months, and it would have taken an evening to prevent.
The near-regret: buying something they did not understand
This one sits slightly outside the list because people rarely phrase it as a regret. They phrase it as confusion.
Somebody holds a scheme and cannot say what it does. It was suggested at a bank counter, or by a relative, and it went in without a question being asked. Sometimes it turns out to be perfectly sensible. Sometimes it has a lock-in they did not know about, or it is a category that does not match anything they are trying to do.
What makes it a near-regret rather than a real one is that the damage is usually modest. What it does cost is confidence. People who hold things they cannot explain tend to distrust the whole arrangement, and distrust is what makes somebody stop, which puts us back at regret number two.
What the four have in common
None of them is about markets, and none of them is about a product.
All four are about behaviour and administration: when you started, whether you kept going, whether you raised it, and whether you wrote it down. Those are the four levers you actually control, and they're the four nobody spends any time on because they're not interesting to research.
Meanwhile the thing people do research exhaustively, which is which scheme, turns out not to generate regret in either direction. Our post on why we never name a fund makes the same argument from a different angle.
The regret I expected and don't hear
I thought I'd hear more of "I should have taken more risk".
Occasionally somebody says it, usually after a strong few years, and it tends to fade the next time markets fall. What I hear far more often is the opposite: relief at having held something they could sit with. People who took less risk than they could have, but stayed the course, generally seem content. People who took more than they could tolerate and then abandoned it are the ones with the story.
That's shaped how I advise. I'd rather set an equity share somebody can live with than the largest one their horizon technically permits, and our page on risk and volatility explains why the two aren't the same question.
What the fifties version sounds like
The regrets shift slightly with age, and the later one is worth naming because it is still fixable when it appears.
People in their fifties less often say they started late. They say they never worked out what they would actually need, so they have no idea whether what they hold is enough. They have been saving diligently against no particular figure.
That is a more comfortable problem than not saving, and it still costs something, because a household that does not know where it stands cannot tell whether to adjust. Our page on SIP for retirement covers the exercise, and the useful part is not a projection but knowing what the household actually spends.
The other one I hear at that age is about the last few years before a goal. Money that should have been getting safer stayed in equity because nobody moved it, and then the date arrived in an awkward month.
What I'd do with this if I were thirty
Four things, matching the four regrets, and none takes long.
- Start now, with whatever amount survives a bad month. The amount matters less than the date you began.
- Write down, today, what you'll do when it falls. Deciding during is not deciding.
- Set a yearly reminder to raise the instalment, tied to your appraisal month.
- Make the list and tell one person. Thirty minutes, once.
None of that involves choosing anything. That's rather the point.
The uncomfortable part for me
If the four things that matter are start, continue, raise and record, then a great deal of what this industry sells is beside the point.
I'm aware that includes some of what I do. The honest version of my job is less about selection than people assume, and more about being the reason somebody didn't stop in March, and the reason the nomination got done. Neither of those is impressive to describe.
But they're the two things that show up in the regret list, so that's where I try to be useful. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) working from Indore since 2014, and if you'd like to deal with all four in one conversation, that's a straightforward hour.
