A friend told me last month he's going to keep renting.

A ₹1.5 crore flat in Bengaluru rents for about ₹40,000 a month, and the EMI on it would be more than double that. He'd take the difference and put it in index funds. Twenty years out, he's richer by renting.

He showed his father and he didn't argue with any of it.

And my friend, sitting there with every number on his side, still felt like he'd flunked some test of being a grown man.

This isn't about property at all. 

His father wasn't wrong about money. He wasn't even talking about money. He was repeating a rule from a world that worked differently, and the rule had outlived the world.

We all have these. Rules we were handed that made complete sense once…

We tend to do one of two dumb things with our parents' advice. Obey it like scripture, or throw it out.

But most of it wasn't wisdom or nonsense. It was practical. 

Buy a house. Get the secure job. Marry on time. Save like a bad month is always coming. Every one of those was the correct move for the conditions they lived in.

A sociologist called William Ogburn had a name for this a hundred years ago, in 1922. Cultural lag. The tools and the economy change quickly, and the beliefs we built around the old setup take much longer to catch up. We spend years living in the gap.

This is more about how advice disguises itself. A rule that keeps you safe for long enough stops feeling like a rule and starts feeling like right and wrong. "Own your home" isn't filed in most people's heads under money decisions. It's filed under what a responsible person does. And you can't argue someone out of a thing they've turned into character.

Let me take two of these apart.

When our parents told us to buy, they weren't being sentimental. For a middle-class Indian back then, a house was close to the only way to keep your money from rotting.

There was no way to put ₹500 into an index fund. The stock market felt distant and risky, the kind of place ordinary people believed they lost money rather than made it. Gold held its value but did nothing beyond that. 

A house did more, it held its worth, you lived in it, and it passed to your children. So of course you bought one. "Rent is money down the drain" was an accurate description of the world as it was.

Now look at what my friend has. Household money in equities and mutual funds climbed from 2% to 15.2% between FY12 and FY25. Demat accounts went from 23 million in 2015 to over 207 million in 2026. And rental yields in the big cities are down around 2-3%, which is a fancy way of saying renting is cheap relative to owning, and the money you save can go somewhere that grows.

The reason buying ever made sense has basically reversed. The belief that you should buy hasn't changed. 

So my friend makes a sound financial decision and still feels, somewhere underneath, like he's done something a little shameful.

The other big one. Take the safe job - bank, government, some large company that would never dissolve.

Back then, if your one income stopped, there was very little to fall back on. No real safety net, no easy way back into work, and a failed venture wasn't a respectable risk you'd taken, it was just a family in trouble. One bad decision could set a family back for years.

If that's the stakes, you don't gamble. Obviously you don't.

But the fall isn't that far anymore. For most people reading this, losing a job is a bad few months. You find another one, you freelance, you try a startup, you move cities. Losing your job just doesn't carry the same threat anymore for most.

So when someone tells their parents they're leaving a stable job to build something, the parents react. They're not being dramatic on purpose. They're feeling a fear that was completely rational in the mid-90s. They inherited the fear.

I have to be careful here, because there's a lazy version of everything I just said.

The lazy version is: parents were wrong, ignore them, do the opposite. But that's just as thoughtless as following everything they said. Doing the opposite of what someone tells you isn't the same as thinking for yourself. 

Chesterton had this bit about a fence. You're walking along and there's a fence across the road, and you can't see why anyone would put it there. The impatient guy says pull it down. And the wiser response is, no, if you can't see the point of it, you're exactly the person who shouldn't be removing it. Go figure out why it's there first. Then we'll talk.

Some of what our parents gave us doesn't apply anymore. And some of it is a fence, still holding something up, even if we can't see what.

Being careful with money might be a habit you no longer need. Or it might be the thing that gets you through a bad year you didn't see coming. Living with your parents can look inefficient, until you find out what childcare costs.

So it's not obey or rebel. It's working out which is which.

The thing I've started asking:

What was this protecting against? And is that thing still around?

If the danger's still there, it's a fence. Keep it, and now you know why, which honestly makes you follow it better anyway. If the danger's gone, it's “lag”, and you're allowed to drop it without feeling like a bad son or daughter, because you of course thought it through.

My friend's dad said a man owns his home. Underneath that was a real fear, that there was no other safe way to build anything. For my friend, that fear doesn't apply anymore. So renting is fine. Better than fine.

But I know people who'd take the "renting is smarter" math and then never invest the difference. They'd just spend it. For them, a house EMI is still doing something useful, it forces them to save without needing to trust themselves to do it.

So it's the same advice, working for one person and against another. You just have to be honest about which one you are.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. Keep your options open, never settle, optimise everything, build the personal brand. Some of that is going to look ridiculous to our kids, and they'll drop it the same way we're dropping our parents' rules, feeling very clever about it. And they'll be right about some of it and badly wrong about the rest, same as us.