Rajan stared at his bank balance – again. ₹1,042. That was it. 72 hours until the next salary credit. Another month, another near-zero. He was 28, a senior software engineer at a fast-growing fintech startup in Indiranagar, pulling ₹1.45 lakh a month. Yet his savings graph looked like a flat ECG. His college buddies now talked about asset allocation and smallcase rebalancing over filter coffee, while Rajan silently prayed they wouldn’t ask about his portfolio. He didn’t have one. “It’s the Bengaluru tax,” he’d joke. Swiggy, Zomato, the new brewery on 12th Main – and a constellation of OTT subscriptions that seemed to multiply every month.

One humid Saturday, his closest friend Vikram dropped by. Vikram – who started a ₹3,000 SIP three years ago and now had a corpus that made Rajan wince. Over cold brew, Vikram asked casually, “Dude, which all OTT platforms do you have on auto-pay?”

That night, Rajan sat with his laptop. He removed auto-subscribe on six platforms. He kept Netflix (his mom’s demand) and Prime (for the rare movie night). Monthly saving: ₹500. It felt small. Embarrassingly small. But Vikram had planted a seed: “You don’t start investing when you have ‘enough’. You start with what you have, even if it’s the price of two pizzas.”

Vikram introduced him to a flexi-cap mutual fund – diversified, active management, the kind that invests across large, mid and small companies. “Start a monthly SIP of ₹500. Just cancel what you don’t watch. Your future self will thank you.” Rajan thought it was almost absurd – a ₹500 SIP? His colleagues were putting in ₹30,000 a month. But Vikram insisted: “The habit matters more than the amount. And flexi-cap gives you long-term compounding without locking you into one segment.”

So on the 7th of every month – the day his salary hit – Rajan auto-debited ₹500 into a flexi-cap direct growth fund. ₹500. The cost of three Domino’s pizzas. He almost forgot about it. Meanwhile, Bengaluru rains came and went, he switched jobs, moved from a 2BHK in HSR to a 1.5BHK in Whitefield, but the ₹500 kept flying silently into the mutual fund, month after month, like a disciplined migratory bird.

Five years later. Rajan was 33, now a lead architect. His salary had tripled. And one afternoon, clearing old emails, he stumbled upon the annual statement from that flexi-cap fund. He almost skipped it – then clicked. The screen refreshed. His eyes widened. He called Vikram, voice shaky:

Rajan leaned back. He remembered that evening with Vikram, scrolling through the sea of ott logos. He had been waiting for the “right time” to invest – when he had ₹10,000 extra, when he got his promotion, when EMIs ended. But it wasn’t a lump sum that opened the door; it was the act of showing up every month with a small sacrifice. The money came from subscriptions he never missed, because he never really used them. That ₹500 was invisible, yet it quietly compounded into a tangible nest egg. Over five years, it became a down payment for a used Honda City, or three international flights, or a seed for something much larger.

More than the money, Rajan gained something else: investment muscle memory. Today, his SIP is ₹25,000 a month. But he never cancelled that ₹500 flexi-cap SIP. It runs in the background, a reminder that you don’t need a windfall to start – you just need to redirect one small habit.

He still has Netflix. But now, before any auto-pay hits, he asks: “Did I really watch this?” That question, born from a friend’s honest inquiry, became his most valuable financial filter.