The quiet case for fewer funds in your core SIP book
Vikram spread the printout across the dining table in their Tinsukia home, pushing aside the steel katoris from dinner. Fourteen pages. His Consolidated Account Statement, downloaded that afternoon after Meera asked a question he could not answer: "How many funds do we actually own?"
The answer, it turned out, was nineteen.
Meera pulled a chair closer. She is not the kind of person who lets a number sit unexplained. "Tell me what each one does."
Vikram tried. The first three were large-cap funds — or maybe two were flexi-cap, he was not sure. One was an NFO his bank relationship manager had called about during a Dussehra "special investment window" in 2019. Two were ELSS funds bought in the last week of March, three years apart, from different fund houses, doing essentially the same thing. And somewhere in the middle, there were four funds that all seemed to hold Reliance, HDFC Bank, and Infosys in their top ten.
"So these four are basically the same fund with different names?" Meera asked.
That was the moment the penny dropped. Not because Vikram was uninformed — he ran a family business, managed payroll for forty employees, and had an MBA from a respectable college. But because the portfolio had grown the way most Indian portfolios grow: sideways. One fund at a time, each added for a reason that made sense in isolation, none removed because removing felt like admitting a mistake.
At Dhansanchay, we call this folio sprawl. And we see it in almost every family we review — in Tinsukia, in Mumbai, in Singapore. The family is not missing schemes. It is missing a core that everyone at home can explain.
The nineteen-fund illusion
Here is what a cluttered portfolio actually costs, and it is not what most people expect.
In a rising market, nineteen funds feel like diversification. The Sensex climbs, your statement turns green across all nineteen lines, and nobody questions the architecture. Your brother-in-law at the Diwali party says he has "twenty-two funds across six AMCs" and it sounds like a badge of honour, like collecting air miles.
The cost reveals itself on a red day.
When the market falls fifteen percent — as it did in 2020, as it did in 2022, as it will again without warning — Vikram sees nineteen different lines of red. He does not know which fund matters most. He does not know which one to hold, which to exit, which was supposed to be the steady one. The information overload becomes anxiety, and anxiety becomes action — usually the wrong action.
In the 2020 correction, Vikram stopped two SIPs and redeemed a third. Not because those funds were bad. Because the sheer volume of red made him feel he had to do something — and stopping a SIP felt like taking back control. It was not control. It was panic wearing a suit.
Meera, who had not looked at the statement at all, was calmer. She did not know which fund was which, so she did not feel the specific anxiety. Her ignorance was, accidentally, a better strategy than Vikram's information. But ignorance is not a plan either.
The arithmetic of duplication
Let us put numbers to Vikram's overlap. Illustrative, not exact — but close to what we see in reviews.
Four large-cap funds. Each charging roughly 1.5% expense ratio (regular plan). Their top-ten holdings overlap by roughly sixty to seventy percent. In practice, Vikram is paying four expense ratios for one-and-a-half exposures.
A single Nifty 50 index fund would give him the same large-cap exposure at 0.2% expense ratio. The excess cost — roughly 1% per year, compounded over fifteen years, on ₹50 lakh invested across those four overlapping funds — adds up to ₹12-15 lakh of wealth that simply leaked away. Not to the market. Not to bad luck. To duplication.
₹12-15 lakh is a semester at a good engineering college. A year of retirement income. A family holiday every year for a decade. It was not stolen. It evaporated — because nobody consolidated.
(Illustrative. Actual expense ratios, overlap, and outcomes will vary.)
What the Dhansanchay shield is actually about
There is a reason our logo is a shield with breathing room inside it, not a chart going up and to the right. Sapna, who designed the brand narrative, calls the negative space inside the shield "what great advice consciously omits." Every week there is a fund someone wants to add, an NFO that sounds irresistible, a colleague's recommendation that feels urgent. The discipline of not adding — of keeping the space inside the shield empty — is where a large part of the value actually lives.
A focused core is three to five funds, each with a clear job. A large-cap anchor for stability. A flexi-cap or mid-cap engine for growth. A debt component for goals within five years. Perhaps an ELSS for tax-saving that doubles as additional equity. That is the structure. Not nineteen instruments. Not seven AMCs. Not a statement that requires an engineering degree to interpret.
When we helped Vikram consolidate — from nineteen funds to four — the first thing he said was not about returns. It was: "I can finally explain this to Meera."
That sentence tells you everything about what consolidation actually achieves. Not better performance — at least not immediately. Something more valuable: clarity. The ability to explain your portfolio to the person you share a life with. The ability to hold it through a correction without paralysis. The ability to make one decision instead of nineteen.
In every Bollywood film, there is a moment in the second half where the hero stops chasing seventeen side plots and focuses. The background music shifts. The camera steadies. The interval chaos gives way to a single, clear purpose. The audience exhales.
Your portfolio deserves that second-half moment. Most portfolios are still stuck in the interval — loud, crowded, and going nowhere.
The emotion manager's job
At Dhansanchay, we describe ourselves as wealth advisors and emotion managers. The emotion part shows up most clearly during consolidation — because families resist it.
"But what if I sell the wrong fund?" (You are not selling. You are merging into a better structure.)
"But that fund gave me forty percent in 2021." (And the four funds that duplicated it diluted that return across five expense ratios.)
"But my uncle recommended this one. He will ask about it at the next family gathering." (Your uncle is not going to pay for your child's education. Your consolidated SIP will.)
Every objection is emotional, not financial. And every objection dissolves the moment we show the family their portfolio in one picture — with the overlaps highlighted, the duplicate holdings named, and the cost of clutter computed in rupees they can feel.
Intensity, Integrity, Intelligence. We track the problem with intensity. We tell you the truth with integrity — even when the truth is that the portfolio you spent eight years building is mostly duplicates. And we apply the intelligence to restructure it in a way that respects your past decisions while building a better future.
That is what the shield protects. Not a number on a statement. A family's ability to sleep through a correction.
Written for general education — not as individual investment, tax, or legal advice. If a point touches your situation, discuss it with a qualified advisor.