People come to me with a number now.
They've watched a video, filled in a calculator, and arrived with something specific. Rs 4 crore. Eleven years. Eighteen percent a year. The video showed them the formula, the spreadsheet did the rest, and they leave with a date by which they'll be financially free.
It looks like planning. It has the shape of rigour. And it is, in my view, one of the most damaging ideas being taught to beginner investors in the Pakistan stock market today.
Not because saving towards a goal is wrong. Because of the assumption sitting quietly in the middle of that calculation, which almost nobody examines.
The Assumption Nobody Checks
Every one of these calculations needs three inputs: the amount you want, the amount you can invest, and the return you'll earn along the way.
The first two are yours. You choose them, you control them, you can be honest about them.
The third one isn't yours at all. And the entire timeline hangs from it.
Change 18% to 12% and your eleven years becomes something much longer. Change it to 8% and the plan barely resembles itself. The single number with the most power over the answer is the one number you cannot choose, cannot control, and cannot know in advance.
Worse, the calculation doesn't just assume a return. It assumes that return arrives the same way every year, in a neat line. Markets have never once behaved like that.
What Actually Happens to Returns
Take our own market over the last decade, using round numbers.
The KSE-100, the benchmark index of the Pakistan Stock Exchange, peaked in 2017 and then went nowhere for years while the economy and politics churned. The recovery began in 2023 and delivered roughly 310% over three years. Someone who held throughout compounded at around 16% a year across those nine years.
Sixteen percent a year sounds like exactly the sort of figure you'd put into a calculator. So let's put it in, and then compare the plan against what actually happened.
Suppose you invest Rs 100,000 a year for nine years. On the spreadsheet's smooth 16% a year, after six years you'd have about Rs 10.4 lakh, and you'd be comfortably on track.
On the path the market actually took, after those same six years you'd have Rs 6 lakh. Nothing but your own contributions, because the market had given you nothing.
You would be 42% behind your plan. Not because you did anything wrong. Not because the 16% was a lie. Simply because returns don't arrive on schedule.
And here is the part that matters most. By year nine, the "behind" path ends up ahead of the smooth one, because the good years arrived late, when you had more money invested to enjoy them. The plan was right about the destination and completely wrong about the journey.
What Goes Wrong at Year Six
Now think about the person living inside that experience.
They have a number. They have a date. And six years in, the spreadsheet tells them they're failing. Not "markets are cyclical and this is normal", but a specific, quantified shortfall against a target they were promised was achievable.
What does that do to a person?
It makes them impatient. It makes them feel that steady investing isn't working, that the plan needs rescuing, that they need to make up lost ground. And the only lever that appears to offer catching up is risk. A more concentrated position. A more aggressive thesis. Borrowed money.
This is the real damage these calculators do. They don't just mislead people about arithmetic. They manufacture a sense of failure at precisely the moment when patience is most valuable, and they point the frustrated investor towards the exact behaviour that destroys portfolios.
The person who abandons a sound approach at year six does so for reasons the video gave them.
I Learned This the Expensive Way
I'm not writing this from theory.
When I was leaving VLEKTRA, I was well behind my own financial freedom number, and I was very aware of it. I had a thesis on a particular stock that I believed could double. So I built the position with borrowed money, around four times leverage, to make that thesis count for something.
The thesis turned out to be correct. The stock did more than double.
I didn't get any of it. Somewhere in between, during an ordinary market correction of the kind that happens most years, the stock fell about a third. Geared the way I was, that routine move took roughly 75% of my portfolio in two months. I was right about the company and it made no difference at all, because I had built a position that could not survive being right slowly.
What pushed me into that trade wasn't a view on the market. It was a number I had decided I needed to reach, and a date I had decided to reach it by. The leverage was just the tool I picked up to close a gap that existed only in a spreadsheet.
The Part That Isn't Ours
There's a dimension to this that I think matters more than the arithmetic.
Our rizq is written by Allah. What we are asked for is effort and honest diligence, not outcomes. We work, we save, we invest carefully, we avoid what is harmful, and then the result is not ours to command. Allah plans better for us than we plan for ourselves, and He knows what we do not.
Setting a precise number and a precise date, and then bending our decisions to force reality into that shape, is not really planning. It is a quiet form of greed, dressed up as discipline. It puts us in the position of demanding a specific outcome on a specific schedule from something that was never in our hands.
I don't say this instead of the financial argument. I say it because the two point the same way. The spreadsheet fails because returns are not linear. The deeper problem is that the person filling it in has taken on a certainty that was never theirs to hold, and will act badly when reality declines to cooperate.
Plan the Things You Actually Control
None of this is an argument for having no plan. It's an argument for planning the right variables.
You control how much you put in. You control how consistently you do it. You control how long you leave it alone, what it costs you, and how the money is spread. You do not control the return, and you certainly do not control when it shows up.
Here's something worth knowing about that first variable, because it's badly underrated.
Suppose you have Rs 100,000 invested and you're adding Rs 10,000 a month. If the market gives 20% and you're skilled enough to double that, earning 40%, your brilliance is worth an extra Rs 20,000 that year. Simply saving an extra Rs 2,000 a month would have added Rs 24,000, beating the doubled return outright.
Early on, your savings rate matters far more than your returns. That's the variable you own, and people rarely talk about it, because "save a bit more and wait" doesn't sell.
You could use the same time in enhancing your incomes and savings for better monthly contributions instead of working out variables that are beyond your control.
So invest a fixed amount every month. Review whether you're doing the things you said you'd do, not whether the market has kept to a schedule you invented for it. Expect long stretches where nothing seems to happen, because that is what the last decade on PSX actually looked like, and the people who did well were the ones still there when it turned.
Be honest in your effort. Leave the outcome where it belongs.
Written by Fatiq Bin Khursheed
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