Mayuresh Jadav owns a 2 BHK in Baner, Pune, worth around Rs 75 lakh. It earns about Rs 28,000 a month in rent. He has never seen a rupee of it.
Every month, that rent goes straight to his retired parents in Nashik, whose pension does not cover their expenses. “Technically, it is an investment asset owned by me,” he said when he spoke to Financial Express Digital exclusively. “But financially, I see the rental income as a way of supporting my parents. “He lives 150 kilometres away in Thane, in a rented flat, paying Rs 38,000 a month to a landlord.
That arrangement tells you what this story is really about. Mayuresh is 35, holds about Rs 1.03 crore in financial assets, and belongs to a generation of Indians carrying two households at once. His crore was built with a hand out to the people behind him.
Mayuresh’s story is the fourth in our series of real-life wealth journeys, but his path to Rs 1 crore looks very different from the three we have featured so far. Naresh built his corpus through two government-backed schemes and patience. Grijesh used a step-up SIP alongside a steady promotion ladder. Manimaran’s journey was shaped by a windfall that eventually disappeared. Mayuresh’s story is about something far more familiar to salaried Indians: building wealth while supporting parents, funding family responsibilities and managing a household of his own.
The “sandwich generation” arithmetic
Mayuresh grew up in Nashik. His father worked at a bank and his mother ran the home. For years, the family lived on rent, sometimes near relatives, before buying a small 1 BHK.
Nobody in the house discussed investing. But Mayuresh watched his mother work. “She would save small amounts regularly, make recurring deposits and buy small quantities of gold whenever possible. I still remember seeing her fill out RD slips and hand them over to the bank teller.”
That image did the teaching. Years later, when he began investing, he arrived at the same method his mother had used at a bank counter: start with whatever you can, and keep doing it.
After engineering in Nashik and a six-month computing diploma in Mumbai, he started work in 2013. First salary, during probation: Rs 9,800 a month. From that first pay cheque, he began sending money home. “My entire salary was never really my money in the early years.”
The demands did not stop there. In 2021, he put in around Rs 7 to 8 lakh towards his younger sister’s wedding, in the same year he was paying down a home loan and raising his SIP. This is the arithmetic of the Indian sandwich generation, and it rarely appears in wealth-building stories: parents to support, siblings to see settled, a spouse and a future of your own to fund, all from one salary.
“When I look back at the journey to Rs 1 crore, I don’t see it as a period where all my surplus money could simply be invested,” he says. Anyone who has quietly wired money home while colleagues compared portfolio returns will recognise the feeling.
Forget stock picks: The engine that actually built his fortune
His story diverges from the usual advice in one important way. Mayuresh did almost everything the personal finance handbooks warn against. He did not invest for four years. His first product was an insurance policy he did not understand. He took an education loan, a car loan, a personal loan, and a home loan. And he still crossed a crore at 35.
The reason lies in his salary history.
2013: Rs 2.4 lakh — first job
2014: Around Rs 6 lakh
2016: Around Rs 8 lakh
2017: Around Rs 9.7 lakh
2026: Around Rs 40 lakh
That is roughly 17 times in 13 years. Mayuresh never described this as a strategy, and it was not one. He moved companies early for a better role, then stayed nine years at one firm and collected promotions. But the effect on his crore is hard to overstate. Over those years, his income grew faster than most funds could, and every increment gave him more to invest without having to cut into his existing life.
His own advice reflects this. “Income growth is probably more powerful than trying to find the perfect investment.” For readers who spend hours comparing funds while ignoring their own market value, that sentence is worth more than any fund ranking.
Rs 2,500 to Rs 70,000: The ladder any salaried reader can copy
His first proper investment came in April 2017: a Rs 2,500 monthly SIP in an ELSS fund, taken mainly for the Section 80C deduction. It was a tax decision more than an investing one. But it started something.
| When | Monthly SIP |
| April 2017 | Rs 2,500 (first SIP, ELSS) |
| Within six months | Rs 5,000 |
| 2018 | Rs 10,000, large-cap funds added |
| Following years | Rs 25,000, then Rs 40,000 |
| Today | Around Rs 70,000 |
That is a 28-fold increase in nine years, and it may be the most copyable thing in this story. He did not wait to build a lump sum first. He did not try to time an entry. Each appraisal triggered an increase, so the SIP grew roughly in step with his salary and the money left before he could adjust his lifestyle around it. A reader earning Rs 40,000 a month today can start this same ladder at Rs 2,500 tomorrow.
The policy he bought without understanding it
Before that came the mistake. Someone he knew sold him an LIC policy, and he bought it without understanding it. He stopped it after eight or nine years, recovering only about 70% of what he had paid in.
Before that came the mistake. Someone he knew sold him an LIC policy, and he bought it without understanding it. He stopped it after eight or nine years, recovering only about 70% of what he had paid in.
Sit with that number. He got back 70 paise for every rupee he had put in, a nominal loss of nearly a third of his capital before even accounting for inflation across those years. Much of that damage came from exiting early, since surrender values on traditional policies are a fraction of what has been paid in. Had the same money gone into an equity fund over that stretch, it would have been worth several times what he received.
Buying a policy he did not understand, from someone he trusted, is among the more common ways Indian households lose money quietly. “Just because someone you know recommends a financial product does not mean that it is right for you,” he says.
The Pune flat that quietly pays his parents’ bills
In late 2018, with his parents encouraging him to buy, he found Mumbai and Thane unaffordable and looked at Pune instead. He bought an under-construction 600 sq ft 2 BHK in Baner for about Rs 57 lakh. His parents contributed roughly Rs 8 lakh to the down payment. He took a Rs 40 lakh loan.
Then he did something clever. Although the flat was under construction and the bank had disbursed only about Rs 18 lakh, he began paying the full EMI of around Rs 35,000 immediately, rather than the smaller pre-EMI interest most buyers pay. Every extra rupee went against the principal from day one. He took possession in 2021, kept adding lump sums from bonuses, and cleared the loan this year.
Judged only on price, the flat has been a modest performer. Rs 57 lakh in late 2018 to about Rs 75 lakh in 2026 works out to roughly 3.5% a year, and adding the rent since possession lifts the total to around 6% annually. His equity funds have done better over the same stretch.
But return was never what this flat was for. “I didn’t necessarily make that decision purely as an investment calculation,” he says. Look at what it actually does. Every month he sends Rs 28,000 to his parents in Nashik, automatically and permanently, while he continues to rent in Thane. He has effectively built his parents a pension out of a property he has never lived in. No spreadsheet captures that, and nothing else in his portfolio does that job.
In 2021, he widened his net, starting roughly Rs 10,000 a month each into Sovereign Gold Bonds and US stocks. He is candid that none of this followed a grand design. “I wouldn’t say I followed a sophisticated asset-allocation strategy from day one. It was more of a gradual learning process.” The portfolio was assembled the way most real portfolios are, one product at a time, as he understood each.
Inside the Rs 1.03 crore corpus: The silent power of EPF and accidental allocation
| Asset (as shared by Mayuresh) | Value |
| Mutual funds | Rs 40 lakh |
| EPF | Rs 32 lakh |
| US stocks | Around Rs 10 lakh |
| Emergency fund (multiple FDs) | Around Rs 10 lakh |
| Gold and SGBs | Around Rs 6 lakh |
| Indian stocks | Around Rs 5 lakh |
| Total financial assets | Around Rs 1.03 crore |
The EPF deserves its own moment. At Rs 32 lakh, it is nearly a third of everything he owns, and it is the one part of the portfolio he never actively managed. It accumulated through payroll deductions across 13 years and multiple employers, growing quietly while he was busy paying an EMI, funding a wedding and learning about mutual funds. Crucially, it never tempted him, because he could not casually withdraw it. For salaried readers who dismiss the EPF line on their payslip as dead money, this is what it becomes when left alone for a decade.
One other detail is worth noting. His gold sits partly in Sovereign Gold Bonds
On a take-home of about Rs 2 lakh a month, he now invests roughly Rs 80,000, close to 40%, before counting EPF. He keeps his emergency fund split across several smaller FDs rather than one, so a partial withdrawal never breaks the whole amount.
Why a Rs 40 lakh earner is terrified of buying a Mumbai flat
Now debt-free, Mayuresh faces his real dilemma. His Thane rent has gone from Rs 24,000 in 2022 to Rs 38,000 today, a steep climb over four years. He fears paying close to Rs 1 lakh a month eventually. Whether that arrives in ten years or twenty depends entirely on how rents behave from here, but the direction of travel is what worries him, and it is not an unreasonable worry.
So, should he buy it? The arithmetic is bracing. Thane's gross rental yields run a little north of 3.5%, according to property portal Square Yards, while ANAROCK Research puts Mumbai’s overall yield at 4.3% as of the second quarter of 2026.
On that basis, a flat renting at Rs 38,000 is worth somewhere between Rs 1.15 crore and Rs 1.3 crore. With a 25% down payment and a loan at about 8.5% over 20 years, the EMI lands between Rs 75,000 and Rs 85,000 a month, roughly double his rent, with Rs 93 lakh to Rs 1.06 crore paid in interest alone.
That gap is the whole argument. Renting costs him Rs 38,000 today and buys flexibility; buying costs nearly double and buys certainty. His instinct is to wait, and he is honest about why. “I am a little scared of immediately taking another large home loan.” He and his wife have no children yet, so their housing needs may change.
He wants to hear from readers who have already made this call, particularly those now in their forties and fifties. What would you tell him?
Achieving ‘FIRE’ with a 30-year-old bank teller strategy
What he has already worked out is the harder thing. At 35, debt-free, with a crore behind him and a 40% savings rate, the sums have quietly stopped being about survival. “I want to build enough wealth to eventually have financial independence and flexibility, a point where working becomes a choice rather than something I absolutely need to do.”
His mother filled out RD slips at a bank counter in Nashik because there was no other way to save. Three decades later, her son moves eighty thousand rupees a month into six asset classes across continents. The method has not changed at all.
Disclaimer: This article is based on the personal financial journey, disclosures and projections shared by the individual featured in the story. Future corpus estimates, pension calculations and retirement projections are based on the assumptions provided by the individual, including expected investment returns, prevailing tax laws and current NPS/PPF rules, all of which are subject to change. Pension amounts will depend on the final corpus, annuity rates available at the time of retirement and applicable tax rules. The PPF interest rate is notified by the government every quarter and may change over time.
This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be construed as investment, tax or financial planning advice, or as an endorsement of any investment strategy. Readers should assess their own financial goals, risk appetite and consult a qualified financial or tax adviser before making investment or retirement planning decisions.
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