SIP Calculator
The approach that suits most salaried people: a fixed amount, every month, regardless of what the market is doing. Move the delay slider to see the real cost of waiting.
Your monthly plan
Your assumption, not our forecast. No market returns the same figure every year.
Move this to see what waiting costs. It is usually far more than people expect.
After 15 years
PKR 7,568,640
From PKR 15,000 invested every month.
- You contributed
- PKR 2,700,000
- Growth added
- PKR 4,868,640
64% of the final figure is growth rather than money you put in.
The cost of waiting
PKR 4,083,554
Starting 5 years later (same monthly amount, same assumed return) leaves you with PKR 3,485,086 instead. The difference is 54% of the total, and you only skipped 60 contributions.
This assumes a constant return applied evenly and contributions made at the start of each month. Real returns arrive unevenly, and this ignores inflation, taxes, and transaction costs. Treat it as an illustration of how regular investing behaves, not a projection of your balance.
What this shows
The delay is the expensive part.
Set the delay to five years and look at the gap. Most people expect starting five years late to cost roughly five years’ worth of contributions. It costs considerably more, because the money you would have invested first is the money with the longest time to compound.
This is the strongest argument for starting with a small amount now rather than a sensible amount later. The first contributions do disproportionate work, and no amount of subsequent effort recovers them.
Why regular investing suits most people
The main benefit is not the averaging arithmetic, which is modest. It is that a fixed schedule removes the decision at exactly the moments your judgement is least reliable , after a long rise, when buying feels safe, and after a fall, when it feels dangerous. Both instincts are backwards and both are very strong.
The month you least want to make your scheduled investment is usually the month it does the most good.
What it does not do
It does not protect you from loss. Investing regularly into a business that deteriorates permanently just means buying more of something falling. And it does not beat investing a lump sum on average, if you happen to have one, markets rise more often than they fall, so earlier money usually has more time to work.
Regular investing is optimal for someone earning a salary and investing as the money arrives. That is most people, but it is worth knowing which case you are in.
There is more detail in our article on setting this up on PSX, including how to work around the absence of an automatic mechanism.
Ready to invest with clarity?
Start with the free material. Book a call when you want a plan built around your situation.