The behavioural moat
Pausing your SIP for a vacation or a festival feels like a small, temporary gap. It isn't. Because the payments you skip are gone forever as compounding fuel, one skipped ₹10,000 can quietly erase nearly ten times that from your final corpus.
Educational tool — not investment advice. Figures are estimates based on your inputs, not predictions. Details
Skipping early costs far more — those payments had the most time to grow.
That's — the ₹— you skipped · ₹— in today's money
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The butterfly effect: cost of skipping one month, by year
A SIP instalment isn't just ₹10,000 of savings — it's a seed that compounds for the entire remaining horizon. Skip it, and you don't just lose the ₹10,000; you lose every rupee it would have grown into. Over 20 years at 12%, a single ₹10,000 contribution would become roughly ₹96,000. That's the real cost of skipping it once.
The chart above shows the asymmetry: a payment skipped in year one had two decades to compound, so its loss is enormous. A payment skipped near the end had almost no time to grow, so skipping it costs little more than the payment itself. If you ever must pause, pausing later in your journey does far less damage — but pausing early, in your twenties or thirties, is the most expensive thing you can do to your future corpus.
We show the real, inflation-adjusted cost alongside the nominal one, because that future loss is in future rupees. Even so, the nominal figure is what your corpus actually loses — and at roughly ten times the skipped amount, it's worth thinking hard before you pause an automated investment.
Questions
Far more than the payment. A single Rs 10,000 SIP skipped at the start of a 20-year, 12% plan costs about Rs 96,000 in final corpus — roughly ten times the amount skipped — because you lose all the growth that payment would have produced.
Yes, dramatically. An early payment has the full horizon to compound, so skipping it is very costly. A payment skipped near the end had little time to grow, so it costs barely more than the payment itself.
The true compounding cost. We deliberately avoid the exaggerated figures some sources quote — and we also show the inflation-adjusted real cost, so you see both the nominal loss and what it's worth in today's money.
Topping up later helps, but it can't fully recover the lost compounding time, because the later contribution has fewer years to grow. The earlier you replace a skipped payment, the more of the loss you recover.