Vol. 01 · A counter-essay · Est. 2026
Mutual Fund Sahi
Nahi Hai.
For twenty years a single sentence sold India a future. It came with a jingle, a celebrity, and the soft authority of a fund house. It worked. Indians now pour ₹30,954 crore into SIPs every month¹.
This page is the argument your relationship manager will never make.
§ 01 · The thesis in one paragraph
A product designed to make fund houses rich cannot, in the same motion, retire you.
Mutual funds are not a scam. That would be too easy. They are something more durable: a mediocre product wrapped in excellent marketing, sold to a country that, for the first time in its history, has surplus salary and no instinct for what to do with it.
The arithmetic is not hidden. Expense ratios, exit loads, STT, capital gains, and behavioural drag together eat between 30% and 45% of the headline return most SIP investors imagine they are compounding. Over thirty years that difference is not academic. It is the difference between leaving the salary grind at 50 and dying at a desk at 65.
§ 02 · Six arguments
Each is uncomfortable.
Together they are the case.
Read in any order. Each point is engineered to survive a long argument with a friend who works at an AMC.
- I.
The 12% return is a fiction the brochure forgot to footnote.
Axis Mutual Fund's 20-year study (2003–2022) showed equity funds returned 19.1% point-to-point, SIPs in those funds returned 15.2%, but the actual investor earned just 13.8% — a ~5.3 percentage-point behavioural-and-timing gap before tax. The brochure number is gross, pre-tax, and assumes a saint.
Argument · I - II.
Expense ratios are the most expensive 1.5% in your life.
SEBI caps regular-plan equity TERs on a sliding scale up to 2.25%; most large equity regular plans sit around 1.5–2.0%. On a ₹1 lakh/month SIP for 30 years at 12% gross, the difference between a 0.5% direct-plan TER and a 2% regular-plan TER works out to roughly ₹2.5–2.8 crore of terminal wealth. The fund manager is not your partner. They are your landlord.
Argument · II - III.
SIP discipline is real. SIP outcomes are not the same thing.
Discipline of saving is a moral good. Discipline of saving into the wrong instrument is just a tidier way of being poor at 60. The two get conflated on purpose.
Argument · III - IV.
“Long-term” is a slogan, not a strategy.
“Stay invested for the long term” is what you tell someone who has no other answer. A strategy specifies what you own, why you own it, what you'll do when it falls 40%, and what counts as enough. Most SIP advice specifies none of these.
Argument · IV - V.
The industry is regulated. Your outcome is not.
SEBI protects you from fraud. It does not protect you from mediocrity, from being sold a NFO you don't need, or from a relationship manager whose bonus depends on you switching schemes every 18 months.
Argument · V - VI.
Wealth in India is built by ownership, not allocation.
Every wealthy Indian family you can name built it from a business, real assets, or concentrated equity in something they controlled. None of them got there by diversifying ₹15,000 a month across four flexi-cap funds.
Argument · VI
Interlude
“The safest way to stay middle-class— Sagar Saroy, The Last Salary
is to invest like the middle class.”
§ 03 · Receipts
The numbers the jingle forgot.
Monthly SIP inflows, May 2026. Third straight month above ₹30,000 cr.
SEBI ceiling on equity MF TER (first ₹500 cr of AUM, regular plan).
Wealth gap between a 0.5% direct vs ~2% regular TER on a ₹1L/mo SIP, 30 years @ 12% gross.
Actual investor return in equity MFs over 20 yrs vs 19.1% headline fund return — Axis MF study.
Behavioural + timing gap between fund return and investor return in the same study.
Number of AMC ads that lead with the after-tax, after-fee, after-behaviour number.
Every number above is sourced — see § 07 · Sources below. The point is not the decimal; it is the order of magnitude.
§ 04 · Anticipated objections
Yes, we've heard them all.
“But SIPs beat FDs.”
Yes — the wrong benchmark. The question is not whether MFs beat the dumbest alternative. It is whether they are the best use of your highest-earning decade. They almost never are.
“Index funds fix this.”
Partially. Index funds fix the fee problem. They do not fix the concentration-of-wealth problem, the tax drag, or the fact that you still don't own anything you control.
“So what should I do instead?”
That is a book, not a tweet. The point of this page is to interrupt the autopilot — not to replace one slogan with another.
§ 05 · Where the argument lives in full
The Last Salary.
A book by Sagar Saroy for the Indian who looked at their CTC, looked at their SIP statement, did the math, and felt something was off. It was. This is the long answer.
- Why the SIP-and-chill consensus quietly fails the salaried
- What the wealthy actually own — and what they pointedly don't
- A framework for designing the salary you stop needing
Sagar Saroy
The
Last
Salary
A field manual
§ 06 · For the skeptical
Questions we keep getting.
- Is this anti–mutual fund?
- It is anti–autopilot. Mutual funds are a tool. They are also wildly oversold as the answer. Those two sentences can coexist.
- Are you a SEBI-registered advisor?
- No. This page is an argument, not advice. It is exactly as binding as the jingle was.
- What if I already have SIPs running?
- Then you are most of India. The book is written for you specifically — not to make you panic-sell, but to make the next ten years deliberate instead of default.
- Who is Sagar Saroy?
- An Indian writer on money and work who got tired of watching a generation outsource its future to a 90-second ad. The Last Salary is the book that started as that argument.
§ 07 · Sources
Show your work.
An argument without receipts is just a louder opinion. Every numeric claim on this page is traceable to a primary source — AMFI's own monthly note, SEBI's regulations, or an AMC-published study.
- 1.
AMFI Monthly Note, May 2026 — total SIP contribution ₹30,954 cr (vs ₹31,115 cr in April 2026). Third straight month above ₹30,000 cr.
amfiindia.com ↗ - 2.
SEBI (Mutual Funds) Regulations, 1996 — Reg. 52(6): equity-scheme TER capped at 2.25% on first ₹500 cr of AUM, sliding down to 1.05% beyond ₹50,000 cr. AMFI explainer summarises the slab structure.
amfiindia.com · Expense Ratio ↗ - 3.
Author's calculation. ₹1,00,000/month SIP for 30 years at 12% gross CAGR → terminal corpus differential of ~₹2.5–2.8 cr between a 0.5% and a 2.0% TER (standard future-value-of-annuity, net-of-fee formulation). Reproducible in any SIP calculator.
amfiindia.com · SIP calculator ↗ - 4.
Axis Mutual Fund 'How India Invests' study, 2022 — over a 20-year window (2003–2022) equity funds returned 19.1% point-to-point, SIPs in the same funds 15.2%, but the average investor's IRR was 13.8%. Coverage in The Economic Times, Cafemutual, Fortune India.
cafemutual.com ↗
Last verified: June 2026. AMFI publishes the next monthly note around the 10th of each calendar month; expect the SIP-inflow figure to drift by ±5% month-to-month.