Regret is the shadow cast by a choice after the light of possibility has disappeared. No wonder, as we age, the shadow keeps on lengthening, taking us back to memories of our youth - of hope, ambition, aspirations. I dreamt of being an entrepreneur as a 20-year-old, and consider myself lucky to have achieved that after a 10-year toil. But I still have regrets about not having done it differently, and I know people with regrets about not having tried it at all. And the story is all about money and how to manage it while you are still young. That's because money changes a person's capacity to act; it does not automatically change whether they act.
I grew up in a modest house where achievement was the only way for small rewards, like a bottle of Coke for being a class topper. Pocket money was not really a thing in our home. Basically, my mind learned to survive on little. When I later had to sleep on an empty stomach and live on bread and water, it didn't hurt. Now, when friends say "you're not a foodie," it doesn't surprise me. For the longest time after CreditVidya was acquired, I didn't buy myself one nice thing, and that didn't surprise me either. Splurging was never in my DNA, but I am not a miser either.
Money can buy comfort, status, time, and more money. But, most importantly, if you use it correctly, it can buy courage to try things you always wanted to do. I have met people with crores in their bank, but still panicky about the future. A bank balance is evidence that you have money, not that you can handle life.
Courage, on the other hand, is evidence that you can learn, that you can make something people want, that you can earn again if this attempt fails, that you can move, adapt, recover, and begin again.
This is what your money should buy in your twenties.
If you left college and started a company immediately, perhaps this letter is not for you. You had a kind of nerve I did not have. If you had one obvious, world-class talent from childhood, perhaps you had a clearer path too. But if you are like me - not born wealthy, not obviously exceptional at one thing, not naturally fearless - then you may need to build courage slowly.
And money can help.
In a large study of U.S. founders, the average age at founding was about 42. Among the fastest-growing new ventures, it was 45. The lesson, of course, is not to "wait until 45." It is that your twenties are not your one shot, but your apprenticeship. Even though our social conditioning hands us the safety-first framework, according to which money's main job in early adulthood is to "protect the status quo", not to buy "optionality", yet in economic terms, the most powerful function of money in your twenties is its capacity to purchase "real options."
Here's my list that will help you accumulate a 'learning capital'
1. Buy Skills
Every financial expert for years has told you the 50/30/20 rule. 50% on needs, 30% on wants, 20% into savings. The formula works perfectly fine, but only if you plan to be an employee at 50. Follow it and live miserably till 50, then spend the rest of your life thinking about what if. So forget the wants and replace them with skills.
Skills will make sure that no matter what happens, you will never be unable to put food on the table, even as you learn to build your startup. Learn to sell, write, build. Learn distribution. Learn how to make complicated things sound obvious. Learn how to use AI so well that you can do the work of five people before lunch.
Get skilled so that when something important needs doing, you are the person people call. Spend on storytelling, because nobody buys from someone who cannot explain what they do.
Pay for Claude Max. A tool that makes you five times faster is not an expense.
Write long-form essays on Substack to improve your thinking. Not because you are trying to become a creator. Because when you finally start, people already know how you think.
And if you do not have time, buy time. Hire help. Get an editor. Remove the work that stops you from doing the work only you can do.
2. Don't gamble
Your mind gets evidence of courage when your skill moves the needle. So here is what you do not do in your twenties: You do not gamble on anything - or anyone - but yourself.
Do not trade in F&O or even intraday. SEBI found that 93% of individual F&O traders lost money between FY22 and FY24. More than one crore people lost a combined ₹1.8 lakh crore.
Crypto is the same game with a more seductive story. It sells you decentralisation, freedom, the future of money, and escape from the system. If you cannot explain where the value comes from, who captures it, why you have an edge, you are not investing.
Same with angel investing: Nine out of ten startups fail. Even when one gets acquired, founders can be diluted, preference-stacked, or bought out with little to show for years of work. You are behind them in the line with no control, no information, and no way out.
None of these bets gives your mind evidence that you can create value. Every rupee you do not gamble away is your own angel round.
3. Buy ACCESS
The fastest way to stay ordinary is to spend all your time with people who have the same problems as you. So spend money getting closer to people who are already where you want to go. Buy a book for the person ten years ahead of you and send it with a note. If someone you want to learn from sells a service, do not ask for a favour. Pay them the full price.
This way, you get the work, the lesson, and the right to call again.
That is the cheapest education you will ever buy.
You cannot buy trust. But you can buy the opportunity to earn it.
While skilling yourself is the first step, access changes the slope of your learning curve.
It buys your mind courage, because now, when you are stuck, your mind knows you are not stuck alone. You know people who have seen the problem before, people whom you can call. A one-hour conversation with someone who has already made the mistake can save you two years of making it yourself.
More importantly, buy access early because it gets much more expensive later.
4. Don't put love on the cap table
Every startup guide tells you to raise a friends-and-family round. I think it is some of the worst advice in the startup canon.
Financing a startup is a terrible bet unless you are extremely well diversified or you have enough FU money lying around.
A startup will take longer than you think, cost more than your budgeted figure, and it may still fail. Then you ask the people who love you to take that bet. They may not understand the market, or have better information, or have any control over what happens, but they will still support you because they love you. And when it goes wrong, you do not only lose the money; you lose the ease.
Research on family financing reaches a similar conclusion: it can turn a family's informal safety net into startup risk capital, making failure emotionally and financially costlier; it can also make founders more hesitant to take the risks their companies need. This is because the borrower and lender never remember the deal the same way. One remembers the help, the other remembers the sacrifice. So do not take money from friends or family and do not lend it either. Do not even go into business together just because you love each other. If someone you love needs money, there are only two clean moves:
Give it out loud as a gift, but only if you can afford to forget it. Or say no. Spend on relationships like they're the asset. Just never put them on the cap table.
5. Don't take money advice from your parents
Your parents played it safe because safe was the whole job. They came from a different India. For them, preserving wealth was not cowardice but survival. For them, stability was the dream and safety meant an FD, a house, and a government job. Respect that. But do not automatically follow it.
Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, has a line I love:
Your personal experience with money is a tiny slice of what has happened in the world, but roughly 80% of how you think the world works.
A flat on EMI at 27 may be the right decision for someone building a settled life in one city. But if you want to build a company, it can also buy you a monthly payment you cannot walk away from. You may need to move to Bengaluru for talent, Mumbai for customers, Delhi for policy, and somewhere else entirely for the next thing.
Do not make it hard to move before you know where you need to go.
Open a Zerodha account. Pick one low-cost Nifty 50 index fund. Set up an auto-debit for salary day. Then close the app and do not open it every morning pretending you are managing wealth. Stick with Index funds, which, though they carry market risk and do not guarantee returns, but their purpose is simple: own a diversified slice of the market rather than trying to be smarter than it.
Your parents saved money to stay safe. You are saving and investing money to stay mobile. It's a different game and will require different rules.
6. Buy experiments
Most people in their twenties get attached to how good their idea is and forget to validate demand. Your brain needs evidence, and evidence is cheap if you buy it before you build.
Pick an idea. Put up a landing page in a day. Add a waitlist, or a founder's price for the first fifty customers.
Spend ₹20,000–₹30,000 on Instagram ads aimed at the exact people who have that problem. See who signs up. Then do it again with a second idea. And a third. Build the one with the biggest waitlist. Talk to the people on that list while you build. Every week. Build in public so the list grows while the product does.
Keep iterating. Change the headline. Change the price. Change the audience. Spend another ₹20,000. Look again. The point is not to be right about your idea, but to get an answer.
And here is why this matters for courage: every waitlist that fills is your brain seeing, with its own eyes, that people want what you make.
That is not motivation, but evidence. You cannot save your way to it. You buy it, ₹20,000 at a time.
7. Don't spend on Status
Here's the line from Housel that should be tattooed on every 24-year-old's wrist:
Nobody is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
Darwin says we need two things: food, and someone to have kids with. You have food. You have a phone with dating apps on it.
Courage is the scarce resource your brain is actually fighting for to get you the ability to design your life the way you want it. And status spending is the biggest leak in that budget.
When you see a guy in a nice car, you do not think he is great. You think I would look great in that car. The car is doing nothing for him. It is doing something for you - for three seconds. Then you forget.
That is what status buys you: three seconds in the head of someone who does not care about you, paid for with months of your runway.
Instead, build the thing that gives you a life you designed. Status can show up later. And when it does, you will not need it. Spend on your mind like you are rich. Spend on status like you are poor. Nobody is looking anyway.
8. Buy Energy
Your skills do not matter if you are too exhausted to use them. Your runway does not matter if your nervous system takes every challenge as a threat. Your courage does not matter if your body has stopped believing you are safe. And more importantly, your wealth won't matter if you are struggling to walk or run because of pain or you aren't attracted to the image you see in the mirror.
So buy energy.
Prioritise your health. Eat clean. Eat organic if you can afford it. Pay for the gym. Sleep well. Keep your body fat under control. Do the blood tests. Get a health check-up before something hurts.
Now the boring rules. Do not do drugs. Do not drink yourself stupid every weekend. Do not get anyone pregnant. Do not get pregnant. Children are the most expensive thing you will ever buy. You will buy them gladly later when the life you built can carry them. Early in life, it does not add to your wellness, but is a maintenance expense.
Your body is the machine that makes every rupee, every decision, and every act of courage in this letter. Do not run the machine into the ground. So buy energy. Then protect it like the asset it is.
Money is your portfolio of options
This week, make two lists: "Made me better" and "Made me look better." Move one expense from the second list to the first.
You may feel scared of putting the wrong thing. That's because the opportunity cost, defined as the value of the next-best alternative you forgo when you choose one option over another, is highest in early years because your future earnings and compounding potential are most sensitive to early career choices. When the financial rules you adopt are designed solely around stability, they treat this optionality as an externality - important in theory, but rarely priced into real decisions.
If you quit a job, lose money, and your startup fails, you can see the loss clearly. You made the decision, and you know exactly what it cost. But if you stay in a job for five years and never try, the loss is harder to see.
You do not see the skills you did not build, the people you did not meet, and the company you could have started. You do not see the life you did not get to test. So your brain treats doing nothing as safer.
In the short term, people tend to experience stronger regret over actions (things they did) than inactions (things they did not do), but in the long term, the pattern often reverses, with inaction regrets dominating.
That is why this letter exists. To help you take control of your future now, so that when memory casts its long shadow in 20 years you only see courage, not regret.
Most money advice is designed to stop you from making a mistake today. This is about stopping you from making the bigger mistake over ten years. Use your money to become more capable.
Buy skills. Buy access. Buy experiments. Buy energy. Keep it away from gambling, status, and obligations that reduce your freedom.
very very insightful, thank you for this🙌