Money best way to buy your freedom; gain choices in life: Ankur Warikoo

Money isn't just about getting rich; it's about gaining the freedom to live life on your own terms, author, creator, and entrepreneur Ankur Warikoo told Puneet Wadhwa at the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit 2026 Smart Investor Arena on Tuesday. The biggest superstars of this generation, the most successful people who emerge from it, Warikoo believes, will not necessarily be the smartest people, but the ones who are intently focused. Edited excerpts:

 Growing up, I used to hate money for the simple reason that we were always short of it. I always felt that our family's struggles were attributable to money, and that if we had enough of it, everything would get fixed. I saw money as the quintessential means of buying things and escaping this middle-classness. 

Things started changing when I began spending money on the things I wanted. I realised it does bring an insane level of happiness, at least up to a point. Don't delude yourself into believing that money doesn't matter. It does, and it matters a lot. But at some point, it starts to have diminishing returns.

At some point, you realised that you don’t necessarily have the money upfront for the things you spent it on, whether it was a house, a car, or a vacation. You have to finance them through loans, essentially borrowing from your future self, and that leaves a feeling of being stuck.

The biggest shift in my thinking came rather late in life: I began to see money as freedom. That's when one truly begins to understand the power of money. It's the freedom to choose the kind of work you want to do, where you want to live, the people you want to work with, the food you want to eat, and the hobbies you want to pursue.

My definition of money is that it's the best way to buy your freedom and give you choices in life. Having choices is what puts you truly in control. Once you have that, you realise you're truly rich. And the biggest realisation is that you don't need a lot of money to get there. You just need to understand how much money you need to live the life you want.

The definition of ‘how much money is enough’ is the starting point. You have to set a finish line for yourself and don’t have to stop there, but at least know you've crossed that milestone. For me, that number came to ₹21.7 crore. Fundamentally, I decided to live life on my own terms. So, one needs to figure out what that number is. Financial planning is necessary for financial freedom because you won't achieve that number if you don't do it.

If you don’t invest regularly, what you’re essentially saying is: Whenever I have money available, I’ll invest it. You'll keep postponing your SIPs until you have extra money or the market falls. Even professionals who spend their time studying markets and predicting the right moment to invest consistently find it difficult.

Put your money into something like an SIP that is a functional, repeatable process. Every month, money will be deducted from your account, and when you look at the impact of compounding over 20–25 years, you will be left spellbound. It's very hard for us, as humans, to imagine what an exponential curve can do for us in life.

The simple thing is to start. Money is actually about psychology. We think of money as something very objective and linear, but it isn't. You need to train your psychology, and the best way to do that is to build habits. I love SIPs not because they're going to make you a millionaire, but because they're the best habit to form around money.

I'd like to believe not. But I do see this trend among the younger lot; they're in a hurry, and they seem to be in a much greater hurry than we used to be, or perhaps than our generation used to be. I try to understand this by looking at our exposure levels. What will actually help one win is finding a way to numb the noise around them, because this noise is the pollutant. At one point, if one went to IITs/IIMs or cleared UPSC, life was sorted. But today, it's not enough to be just smart. The bigger determinant is your ability to focus, block out the noise, and concentrate. Focus, in my opinion, is the new IQ. The biggest superstars of this generation, the most successful people who emerge from it, will not necessarily be the smartest people, but the ones who are intently focused.

There's often this advice doled out: quit your job to follow your passion. One should not follow that blindly. The practical side is that you need a regular income to live life, pay bills, support family, and do whatever one wants to do. So, the right advice is not to quit your job to follow your passion. Because if your passion becomes responsible for providing for your life, it will get choked and will no longer remain your passion.

My recommendation: stay in your job. Don't make it your dream job for life. Then use your nights, weekends and holidays to build something on the side — something you're passionate about, something you'd love to do — without putting any pressure on yourself to earn money from it from day one. It may take six months, 12 months, maybe even two years, but it will unlock something you won't know how to value until you experience it.

Financial freedom, for me, is not retirement in the conventional sense of the word. Nobody really retires if they especially like their job. I feel financial freedom means that you can do what you want. It adds a sense of purpose to your life and so on.

The way you invest also changes, because the question isn't just about growing your money; it's also about protecting it.

The only way I can do that is by not putting myself under the pressure of trying to change them. I don't wake up any morning feeling any sort of pressure that I have to change Gen Z. There was a time when I had that saviour mindset, where I felt I had to protect people. But if anything changes through the consumption of my content, or anybody else's, it will only help you. There is no gratification that will come to the other person in any shape or form. When you relieve yourself of that pressure, things become really simple.

If you ask me, I'm a sadist. I love the fact that the market has been going through a correction in the last two years, because that's the reality check investors need. Young investors have no idea what happened in 2008 or in 2015. You have this idea that the market will always go up, and I want you all to correct this assumption and go through this grind. Hopefully, you won't lose confidence in the stock market and will continue investing. But if you lose, of course, it's your loss, not anybody else's. Now there is a concept of alpha and beta. The right instrument to invest in is not high alpha, high beta. The right instrument to invest in is high alpha, low beta. Alpha is your high return, but you need to ask this question: How much beta do I have to give for this alpha? This is not just for money, but for everything in life. If you understand both alpha and beta, that's when you're a smart investor. And the current phase is a brilliant opportunity for you to understand this deeply.