Here's a scenario that surprises most people the first time they see it. Two friends each invest ₹5,000 a month. Friend A starts at 25 and stops investing entirely at 35, leaving the money untouched after that. Friend B starts at 35 and keeps investing every month until 60. Despite investing for a third of the time, Friend A often ends up with a comparable or even larger corpus by retirement, purely because their money had ten extra years to compound before Friend B even began.
Why this happens: those first ten years of compounding, even though Friend A wasn't actively adding new money after 35, kept growing on themselves the whole time. The base built early had decades to snowball, while Friend B's later, larger contributions simply didn't have the same runway of time to work with.
This isn't an argument for stopping early — ideally you'd do what Friend A did and keep going, which beats both scenarios. The real lesson is about the cost of delay: every year you put off starting is a year of compounding you can never get back, no matter how much more you invest later to "catch up."
The practical takeaway: if you haven't started investing yet, the specific amount matters far less right now than simply beginning. Even a modest ₹2,000 or ₹3,000 a month started today is doing work that a larger amount started five years from now can't fully replicate — because no later contribution can buy back the years you didn't have invested.