Money face-offs, decided with your numbers
Interactive side-by-side tools for the decisions everyone agonises over — invest or prepay, buy or rent, SIP or lump sum.
All comparisons
Buy vs Rent Calculator
Buy a home or rent & invest the difference — compared by net worth.
FD/RD vs SIP Calculator
Guaranteed FD/RD vs a market-linked equity SIP on the same monthly amount.
Prepay Loan vs Invest Surplus
Should a lump sum go to prepaying your home loan or into investments?
SIP vs Lumpsum Calculator
Invest the same total as one lump sum or a monthly SIP — see which ends up bigger.
Why these four decisions are worth modelling
Each of these is a fork where the intuitive answer and the arithmetic answer often disagree, and where the gap is measured in lakhs rather than percentages. A calculator settles them in your own numbers instead of someone else's example.
Lump sum vs SIP
If the money already exists, deploying it at once usually wins, because every rupee starts compounding immediately. Put ₹12,00,000 in on day one at 12% and after ten years it is about ₹37.3 lakh; drip the same ₹12,00,000 in as ₹10,000 a month over those ten years and it reaches roughly ₹23.2 lakh. The gap is not a return difference — it is time in the market. The honest counter-argument is behavioural: a SIP is what most people can actually sustain, and an investment you keep beats one you abandon after a bad quarter.
Guaranteed vs market-linked
The same ₹12,00,000 in a fixed deposit at 7%, compounded quarterly for ten years, matures near ₹24.0 lakh — and unlike the equity figure, that number is contractual. The comparison is therefore not "which is bigger" but "what am I paying for certainty, and can I tolerate the years where the market number is lower". Tax treatment differs too: FD interest is taxed at your slab as it accrues, which the headline maturity value never shows.
Prepay a loan or invest the surplus
Prepaying returns exactly your loan rate, risk-free and untaxed, and it is worth most in the early years when almost all of your EMI is interest. On a ₹30 lakh home loan at 8.5% over 20 years, a single ₹5 lakh prepayment in month 12 saves about ₹14.1 lakh in interest. Investing the same surplus might beat that — but it has to beat it after tax and with certainty, which is a higher bar than the raw percentages suggest.
Buy or rent
The version worth running compares net worth, not monthly outgo. Rent is not "wasted money" any more than loan interest is, and the buyer's case rests on principal repaid plus price growth exceeding what the same down payment and monthly difference would have earned invested.
Every figure above comes from the calculators on this page, computed rather than quoted, at the assumptions stated. Change the assumption and the numbers move — which is the point of running your own.