What is a SIP?
A Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) is a standing instruction that auto-debits a fixed amount from your bank account on a chosen date and buys mutual fund units at that day's NAV. You are not investing in a special product. You are using a calendar to remove the timing question. Most equity SIPs in India start at ₹500. The fund house (AMC) executes the order through your broker or directly via the AMC app.
Say you start a ₹5,000 monthly SIP into a Nifty 50 index fund at age 25. Assume a long-run return of 11% (the Nifty's roughly 20-year CAGR). At 60, you have invested ₹21 lakh of your own money. The corpus is around ₹2.3 crore. Drop the start by ten years and the same SIP ends near ₹70 lakh. Time, not the amount, does most of the lifting.
Stopping the SIP when markets fall. The whole point of a SIP is that a falling NAV gives you more units for the same rupee. Investors who paused in March 2020 missed the cheapest units of the decade.
A 60-second lesson on this, with a worked drill, lives inside the Finlo app. Free, forever, on the basics.