‘I’ll start once things settle down. It sounds like a plan. It even sounds responsible. But I’ve come to believe it might be one of the most expensive things a person can say to themselves.
I’ve been investing in equity for about five years now. In the investing world, that’s not very long. I haven’t lived through a 2008 or a 2020 market crash. The geopolitical uncertainty of the past year and the 10% correction that came with it felt uncomfortable to sit with, even for me. But it taught me something I keep coming back to.
About the author: Sneha Rege writes about personal finance and retirement planning based on her own journey as a salaried professional. She has cleared the NISM Series XA exam and continues to learn. She shares her notes, study material, and simple guides for NISM learners at sneharege.com, along with her thoughts on making better money decisions in real life.
Experienced investors don’t get rattled by this kind of thing. Not because they know something others don’t, but because they’ve been through enough market cycles to understand that calm is not the normal state. It’s the exception. Waiting for things to become normal is not a plan, it’s a way of not making one.
Most people think the biggest threat to their financial future is a market crash. I don’t think that anymore. I think it’s the years that passed by while they were getting ready to start.
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A few months ago, I had a long conversation with someone close to me.
She wanted to get serious about money. Life had reached that point where ignoring it wasn’t comfortable anymore : responsibilities were growing, expenses were going up, and the future was starting to feel less distant.
We spoke for hours. I shared what I’d been doing over the last few years, and suggested a couple of books I’d found genuinely useful: Monika Halan’s Let’s Talk Money and Let’s Talk Mutual Funds.
She actually took it seriously. She went home, made spreadsheets, tracked her expenses, and figured out her goals. We started discussing about beginning with a small SIP, just to get something moving.
A month later I asked if she’d opened her investment account.
“Not yet. An unexpected medical bill came up.”
That was fair.
Two months later, she was waiting for a lump sum payment that had been delayed. A few months after that, she’d start once the salary increment came through.
Six months passed. Nothing had moved.
I stopped asking after a while. Not because I didn’t care, but because I could tell it was making her feel bad, and honestly it was making me anxious too. Every time we spoke, the gap between what she intended to do and what was actually happening felt wider.
She wasn’t being careless. She just felt genuinely stuck with a tough situation and believed things would settle down, and that’s when she’d start.
I’ve started thinking of this as the Stability Illusion, the idea that this particular phase is the hard one, and the next one will be easier.
Once this expense clears.
Once work calms down.
Once things are a bit less uncertain.
But life doesn’t work that way. One responsibility ends and another takes its place. The loan gets paid and the rent goes up. The work pressure eases in one area and arrives in another.
Waiting for stability before you start investing is a bit like waiting for the sea to go flat before you learn to swim. You’d be waiting forever.
My own start had no strategy behind it at all.
My first SIP was Rs. 2,500. A friend mentioned a mutual fund in passing one evening, I happened to have some money left over that month, and I just started. No goals written down, no allocation plan, nothing. Just Rs. 2,500 leaving my account every month.
Looking back, it was quite messy with no plan, no investigation. But that one decision pulled me back into something I had always enjoyed, numbers. Slowly the curiosity turned into reading, the reading turned into some kind of structure, and the structure eventually became an actual plan.
Today I think about things like risk tolerance, time horizons, savings rates, and debt ratios. I automate my investments so the decision doesn’t depend on how I’m feeling in a given month.
None of that would exist if I’d kept waiting for the right conditions. The learning, failing, and planning came after.
On another occasion, an ex-colleague told me she’d start investing after sorting out “a few responsibilities”: a small loan, a family trip that had already been postponed twice, a phone upgrade she needed, and a bonus she was waiting on.
None of those things was unreasonable. But together, they just kept pushing the starting line back.
Six months later, she said something that stayed with me: “I know I should start. It just never feels like the right time.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. It rarely does feel like the right time. That’s not a personal failing, it’s just how life tends to go. The real question is whether you wait for the feeling to change, or you start before it does.
The most powerful force in finance is time, Morgan Housel mentioned so in his book “The Psychology of Money”
Not which funds you picked, not how closely you follow the news, not whether you bought at exactly the right moment. Just how long has your money been working?
While I was preparing for my Retirement Adviser exam, one idea kept coming up across every module: retirement planning has very little to do with predicting markets. It has almost everything to do with starting early and staying consistent.
People tend to think the biggest risk in investing is a market crash. Something visible, something you can feel in your portfolio and read about in the headlines. But there’s a quieter risk that doesn’t show up anywhere: the years that pass while you’re waiting to begin.
We’ve all heard this line in a loop: Time in the market beats timing the market.
It has been repeated so often that it barely registers anymore. But underneath the familiarity, it’s pointing at something real: most wealth isn’t built through brilliant decisions. It’s built through early decisions and then left alone.
So, if you’re currently waiting for things to settle before you start, here’s something worth sitting with.
Think back over the last five years of your life. Did things actually settle at any point, or did one set of responsibilities just give way to another?
For most people, it’s the second one. Which means the stability you’re waiting for isn’t coming, at least not in the way you’re imagining it.
The start doesn’t have to be well-planned. Mine certainly wasn’t. A small SIP, no goals, no strategy. Just a beginning. The plan comes later, as you learn more and understand yourself better as an investor.
The years that end up mattering financially are rarely the clean, sorted ones.
They’re the years when something was always slightly off, when the timing never quite felt right, when there was always a reason to wait a little longer.
The only difference, looking back, is whether someone started anyway.
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