Building Wealth Is Going To Be Boring – Embrace It

Trying to find information in my inbox is not very different from dumpster diving—and yet, every week, I find myself getting caught in the depths of reminders from 2015, wading through memberships that have long expired with publications that no longer exist.

This week, I was searching for information about my taxes (’tis the season!) when I stumbled upon investment records from 2015. This was around the time the NSDL started sending out their colourful Consolidated Account Statements.

My savings – as expected – were anaemic. But, my SIPs from 2015 continue to date. And that’s the only takeaway here. Building savings for the long term is just year after year of the same thing, over and over and over again.

It’s really boring. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Morgan Housel has this great story in Psychology of Money, where he talks about how the ice age was the result of very marginal increases over time. And that’s more or less what investing is. It’s not exciting to watch. It’s not sexy. It’s not something you’d be writing Twitter (X?) threads on or Linkedin posts about.

I say this because I see so many people I know signing up for ‘masterclasses’ and spending hours on YouTube trying to learn complex financial instruments like Futures and Options or day trading, and my only reaction is: why?

Unless you’re trying to build a career as a trader, there’s no need to so much as glance in the direction of these instruments. Building a significant corpus of savings only needs two things: a start, and the patience to stay the course over two to three decades.

Rinse and repeat is the only strategy you need

One can draw many parallels from fitness and nutrition to effective investing. The other day, I watched a video about how Virat Kohli ate the same dish throughout a tournament because that was what his body needed. Investing is no different. There are so many free resources that do the work of picking the best funds for you that you could literally poke a pencil on the screen and pick one to start an SIP in.

I love boring

I love index and mutual funds. They’re the vanilla ice cream of investing—plain initially, but you learn to appreciate the rich speckles of the bean and its flavour over time. I say with pride that my investing strategy is vanilla as well. I’d rather spend time thinking about what I want to do with my money than where to put it. What are the colleges my child can go to? What are the deserted islands I could potentially retire in? What am I even going to do post-retirement? Thinking about all this, though – is anything but boring.

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments.