Once a week for twenty-five years. You don't pick up. So the ₹3,000 I would've spent working up the nerve to call again goes somewhere else instead.
₹16.80crore
Of that, ₹3.32 cr is money I actually put in. The other ₹13.48 cr is time doing the work.
That's 1,300 deposits, none of them withdrawn.
Three things are working at once. None of them is impressive on its own. Together they're the whole trick.
Money that isn't touched earns a return, and next year that return earns its own return. That's compounding. The first ₹3,000 — one single missed call in week one — is not withdrawn for 25 years.
This is the step-up. As income rises, so does the weekly amount: ₹3,000 in year one, ₹10,554 by year ten, ₹85,876 by year twenty-five. It's the difference between a modest result and an absurd one.
Compounding is boring for two decades and then violent. Of the ₹16.80 crore, ₹10.57 crore shows up in the final five years alone. This is the single most important thing on this page: quitting in year eighteen doesn't get you most of the money, it gets you a third of it.
Dividends are the cash a company hands shareholders instead of keeping it. It's tempting to treat them as a bonus stacked on top of the 18% — free money arriving quarterly. That's the most common mistake in this kind of maths, and it's worth getting right.
Total return already equals price movement plus dividends. So an 18% total return with a 2% dividend yield means the share price rose about 16% and the rest arrived as cash. Adding 2% on top of 18% would be counting the same rupees twice.
This is the awkward part for our specific plan. Fast-growing tech reinvests its cash rather than distributing it — yields across the big AI names sit near a fraction of a percent, and some pay nothing at all. A concentrated AI portfolio is almost entirely price growth. Dividends become a real force only if you hold broad indices, banks, energy or FMCG alongside.
A dividend that gets reinvested keeps compounding. A dividend that gets spent leaves the machine permanently. At a 3% yield over 25 years, spending them instead of reinvesting costs almost five crore — not because the dividends were large, but because everything they would have earned never happened.
Since 2020, dividends are added to your income and taxed at your slab — up to about 31% including cess. Long-term capital gains on equity held over a year are taxed at 12.5%, above a ₹1.25 lakh annual exemption. Same rupee of return, roughly two-and-a-half times the tax bill, paid every single year instead of once at the end. This is why growth options and accumulating funds beat payout options for anyone building a corpus.
Don't take my word for any of it. The dividend yield is carved out of the total return, not added to it — so raising it doesn't magically raise the answer. It only changes how much of your return is exposed to dividend tax and to the temptation of spending it.
Every row is a year of unanswered Tuesdays. Updates with the dials above.
| Milestone | Calls | Each call | Deposited | Dividends | Worth |
|---|
The dividend column is cumulative cash thrown off along the way. Under the first two settings it goes straight back in and is already inside the final column; under the third, it's money that left.
Every projection on this page is arithmetic, not prophecy. Three things could make it look very different, and you should see them before the big green number does any convincing.
Long-term capital gains at 12.5% on ₹13.48 crore of growth, due when you sell. Leaves roughly ₹15.12 crore in hand.
Same plan at 10% a year instead of 18%. AI and tech stocks have returned 15–20% recently; concentrated sectors don't owe anyone a repeat.
The weekly deposit in year 25 under a 15% step-up. That's ₹44.7 lakh in one year. Capping the step-up at 10% is the version people actually finish.
The honest version of this plan isn't 100% AI stocks. It's a broad index doing most of the work, a tech tilt for the upside, a little in debt or gold so a bad year doesn't end the experiment — and a step-up you can survive into your forties. Hold it in growth or accumulating options so returns compound untaxed until you sell.
So take your time. Every ring you let go is compounding beautifully.