Investing & Dividends Misleading — the headline number is real but unrepresentativ

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-07-17 · 7 min read

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₹6,000 salary to ₹13 crore: what the INDmoney “common man” story leaves out

Verdict: Misleading — the headline number is real but unrepresentative. The ₹13 crore is believable; the path that built it is not something a salaried beginner can copy.

INDmoney’s video, titled “₹6,000 Salary to ₹13 Cr Net Worth | A Common Man Story,” runs about 50,000 views and features a guest named Anand who says he started earning ₹6,000 (~$72) a month in 2001 and now sits on a net worth of “13 to 15 crores” (~$1.5 million). It’s a warm, funny interview, and — to its credit — an unusually honest one. The problem isn’t the honesty. It’s the title, and what a hopeful 25-year-old will take away from it.

What the video actually claims

The framing is the classic rags-to-riches arc: a low first salary, decades of investing, and the “power of compounding” delivering a multi-crore fortune. Anand walks through his portfolio on camera — roughly ₹7 crore in real estate (two homes), ₹2.75 crore in Indian mutual funds, ₹25 lakh in US stocks, ₹40 lakh in Indian equity ETFs, and about ₹1.2 crore in ULIPs. Add it up and you land near ₹13 crore.

He credits a handful of moves. He kept his SIPs running through the 2020 COVID crash instead of stopping them, so he “was buying at the lowest price.” He tried “copycat investing” — buying whatever big-name investors like Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Radhakishan Damani held — putting 43 lakh into five stocks that grew to 65 lakh in six months. And the app itself gets a plug: INDmoney showed him how to switch from regular mutual funds to direct funds, how to invest in US stocks, and how to borrow against his holdings instead of selling.

One aside worth correcting: Anand says the LRS cap on sending money abroad was “7 lakh.” In fact the RBI’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme allows up to USD 250,000 per financial year per resident individual — a small detail, but a sign of how casually even a successful investor holds the rules.

That’s the pitch. Start small, stay invested, let compounding do the rest. Simple.

What the story actually contains

Read the transcript closely and a very different picture emerges — one the title quietly buries.

First, Anand didn’t get rich on a ₹6,000 salary. He built a web design and software business in 2011. The investing money came from business income, not a paycheck. That’s a founder’s story, not a salaried employee’s, and the two have almost nothing in common when it comes to how much capital you can deploy.

Second, the timing was extraordinary. His best single result — 43 lakh becoming 65 lakh in six months — happened because he bought during the March–April 2020 crash, at the exact bottom of a once-in-a-decade dislocation. He’s candid that he had no method: “I just went into the market, found out the biggest names, and just invested on one shot.” That’s not skill. That’s a coin flip that landed on heads during the fastest recovery in market history.

Third, and most important for anyone tempted to copy him: he lost a lot of money doing the exact things beginners are drawn to. He wiped out ₹15 lakh (~$18,000) trading futures and options — in three rounds of 5 lakh each — as recently as six or seven months before the interview. He calls it “the tuition fee I paid to the market.” Here’s the number the video never puts on screen: SEBI found that 93% of individual F&O traders lost money between FY22 and FY24, with aggregate losses topping ₹1.8 lakh crore. Even in the cash market, SEBI found roughly 7 in 10 intraday traders lose money. Anand landed in the losing 90%. Most viewers will too.

Would his ₹13 crore exist if the market had gone sideways for five years instead of tripling? Almost certainly not.

The leverage nobody frames as risk

The engine under this story is borrowed money, and the video treats it as clever rather than dangerous.

Anand pledged his wife’s gold to raise 43 lakh for stocks. He took home loans and car loans stacked on top of each other — at one point paying ₹3.5 lakh a month in EMIs. And the app feature he praises, a loan against securities (LAS), let him borrow instead of selling. That’s genuinely useful when it works. But LAS interest rates in India typically run 9–15% a year, and if your pledged portfolio drops sharply, the lender issues a margin call — you either add money or they sell your holdings at the worst possible time. Leverage cuts both ways. It magnified his gains in a bull market; in a prolonged downturn with those same EMIs due, the story ends very differently.

Anand knows this. “I would never advise anyone to do this mistake of taking leverage and investing in the market,” he says. The title of the video does not carry that warning.

Who this path actually rewards

Wealth like Anand’s tends to require some combination of a few things, and he had most of them: a business generating investable surplus (not just a salary), a large lump sum to deploy (his 43 lakh gold-pledge bet), and the luck of buying at a generational low. Layer on ordinary Indian equity math — the Nifty 50 has compounded at roughly 12–13% a year over the long run — running on a big base for 10-plus years, and crores are possible.

The salaried beginner watching this has none of those levers. A ₹10,000 monthly SIP at 12% takes about 20 years to reach ₹1 crore. That’s the real, unglamorous version of “compounding.” It works. It’s just slow, and it looks nothing like 43 lakh turning into 65 lakh over a monsoon.

What you’d realistically earn

If you’re a salaried investor doing the boring, defensible version of Anand’s story — a disciplined SIP into low-cost index or diversified equity funds, held through crashes — a 10–14% annual return over a couple of decades is a reasonable expectation, not a promise. No single year will look like his 2020. Most years will be dull. Some will be red.

What you should not expect is the ₹13 crore headline, because most of that figure isn’t repeatable investing returns. Around ₹7 crore of it is real estate that Anand himself calls “the biggest mistake” he’s made — illiquid, and (by his own account) a drag versus what equities would have done. And here’s the tell the video never resolves: despite ₹13–15 crore on paper, Anand says he is not financially independent. He needs about ₹5 lakh a month to live and keep investing, his assets don’t throw off that income, and he figures he needs “another 10 to 15 crore” to actually stop working. A “common man” who reaches ₹13 crore and still can’t retire is not the success story the thumbnail is selling.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

The genuinely useful lessons here are small and cheap: keep your SIPs running when markets fall, prefer direct mutual funds over regular ones (the expense difference compounds), don’t try to time exits, and stay away from F&O unless you’re prepared to be in SEBI’s losing 90%. If you’re a salaried person with a 15–20 year horizon and the temperament to ignore your portfolio during crashes, that’s your takeaway — and it’s a good one.

This story is not a template if you’re planning to pledge assets, stack loans, chase star investors’ portfolios, or treat derivatives as a shortcut. Anand did all of those and repeatedly says he regrets them. The video’s honesty is real; its title works against it.

If you’re weighing where to actually put money, our looks at what to make of “16 stocks to buy now” style lists and the real-estate math behind home-sale hype cover the same temptations from a different angle.

What to remember

Anand’s ₹13 crore is probably real, and his candor about every mistake is the best thing in the video. But strip out the business income, the leverage, the perfect COVID-bottom entry, and a decade-long bull run, and there’s no “₹6,000 salary” blueprint left — just a founder who took big risks, got lucky on timing, lost lakhs where most people lose, and still can’t retire. Copy the SIP discipline. Skip the rest.