I Want to Tell You Something Nobody in Personal Finance Will Admit
Most personal finance blogs are written by people who got everything right.
They started their SIP at 22. They never touched F&O trading. They maxed their PPF every year. They retired early and now teach others how to do the same. Good for them.
This article is not written by that person.
I am a PSU employee with over a decade of service, a stable salary, and a financial history that includes five years of bad decisions, significant losses, active trading loans, and almost no savings to show for it.
I am writing this because I believe there are thousands of government and PSU employees across India sitting exactly where I was sitting — excited about the market, convinced they’ve found a shortcut, or already deep in a hole they don’t know how to climb out of.
If you recognise yourself in any part of this story — keep reading.
If you’re thinking about starting F&O trading — keep reading.
If you’re currently trading and something feels wrong — keep reading.
This is not a lecture. This is a mirror. I’m holding it up to myself first.
It Started With Excitement — Like It Always Does
It didn’t start with research. It didn’t start with a book or a YouTube video or a carefully thought out plan.
It started with a phone call.
A broker’s agent called me in 2020. COVID lockdown was in full swing. Offices were shut, markets were volatile, and millions of Indians were suddenly sitting at home with time on their hands and phones in their pockets. I was one of them.
The agent explained F&O trading. I had never heard of it before that call. He made it sound logical, accessible, and exciting. He walked me through everything — how options work, how to read charts, how to place trades. It felt like being let in on a secret that most people didn’t know about.
So we started trading.
The first few weeks were a roller coaster. Loss after loss sometimes. Profit after profit other times. That unpredictability is exactly what makes it addictive — the wins feel like skill, the losses feel like bad luck that’s about to turn. You keep going because you’re convinced the next trade is the one that fixes everything.
The market is designed to let you win just enough to stay. I stayed far too long.
The Roller Coaster Nobody Warns You About
Let me tell you about two specific days that defined what F&O trading actually feels like.
I had bought put options on a stock. The entire trading day passed and my position was deep in the red. Options trading runs on expiry deadlines — monthly, weekly — and I had a habit of holding until either profit arrived or expiry forced my hand. That evening I closed my laptop with a heavy chest. Couldn’t eat properly. Couldn’t sleep properly. Lay awake running the numbers in my head, hoping the market would move in my favour by morning.
The next day the market opened and my position had swung to a profit of approximately ₹1.5 lakh.
I was on cloud nine. Genuinely euphoric. The kind of happiness that makes you feel invincible. I exited the trade immediately and locked in the profit.
Then, before the trading session ended that same day, I entered another trade — Nifty 50 weekly options. By close, my portfolio had taken a hit of approximately ₹1.1 lakh in a single session.
Two days. One sleepless night. One moment of pure euphoria. One gut punch that wiped out most of what I’d just won.
That is the roller coaster nobody warns you about. Not the losses — you expect losses. It’s the whiplash between the highs and the lows that breaks you. Sleepless nights begging for trades to go right. Celebrating wildly one morning. Staring at a red screen by afternoon. Telling yourself you’ll stop after this one trade. Then placing another.
That cycle has a name. It’s called addiction. The market didn’t invent it. But it perfects it.
What F&O Actually Took From Me
People assume F&O trading is a financial mistake. It is. But that’s the smallest part of what it actually takes.
Let me tell you what it really took from me.
It took my presence. During those years, my mind was never fully at home even when my body was. A bad trading day meant everyone around me paid the price. My mood was always broken. My reactions were always disproportionate. My wife would say something — anything, good or bad — and I would respond with frustration, irritability, or silence. Not because of her. Because of a number on a screen that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
She married me in 2020. The same year it all started. She deserved a husband who was actually there. I was somewhere else entirely.
It took my financial future. The years I spent losing money were years I could have been building something. A growing SIP. A paid down loan. A family trip that didn’t require calculating whether I could afford it. Small things that would have added up to a life that felt lighter.
Instead what I have now is debt that will take years to clear, a portfolio of stocks still sitting in loss, and the quiet guilt of knowing exactly what those years could have looked like.
The money I lost — that’s a number. I can work toward recovering it.
The time I lost — that cannot be recovered. Ever.
When I say F&O took 15 years from me, I mean this: the financial damage will take years to undo, and the emotional cost of those years is something I’m still calculating.
No trade was worth that. Not one.
The Moment I Finally Stopped
There was no single dramatic moment when I stopped. It happened slowly, painfully, and only after I had nothing left to fund the next trade.
I have spent nights that I don’t talk about. Nights where I sat alone wondering how the EMI of that month would be paid. Nights where the stress was physical — chest heavy, mind racing, no way out visible. I am not ashamed to say that I cried during those nights. Anyone who says they wouldn’t is lying.
Eventually the trading account ran dry. Not by choice — by exhaustion. I stopped refunding the terminal simply because there was nothing left to refund. That forced pause became a permanent one.
Then began the slow, unglamorous work of loan repayment. No celebrations. No milestones worth posting about. Just month after month of directing whatever was left after EMIs toward closing the damage quietly.
In late 2025, something shifted. A few of the smaller loans closed. The monthly outflow dropped. And for the first time in years I felt something I hadn’t felt in so long I had almost forgotten what it was.
I could breathe.
That feeling — of one less EMI, of slightly more room at the end of the month — is impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t lived its opposite. It was worth more than any winning trade I ever had. Any of them.
That breath of free air is what finally defined my decision. Not wisdom. Not a book. Not a YouTube video about financial freedom.
Just the simple, overwhelming relief of breathing without debt pressing down on my chest.
I chose that feeling over the trading terminal. I’m not going back.
What I’m Doing to Recover
I am not going to pretend I have a sophisticated recovery plan. I don’t. It is brutally simple.
Step one: stop the bleeding. No new loans. No new trading accounts. No refunding any terminal. The chapter is closed.
Step two: repay aggressively. Every rupee of discretionary spending that can be cut, is being cut. No frequent eating out. No alcohol expenses. No expensive vacations. These are not permanent sacrifices — they are temporary trades. Two years of tightness in exchange for a lifetime without this weight.
Step three: direct every windfall toward the loan. Every DA hike that comes in January or July — loan repayment. Every annual increment in April — loan repayment. When the pay scale revision comes with its arrear payment — every rupee of that arrear goes directly to the outstanding balance. Not a single rupee of unexpected income goes toward lifestyle before the loan is cleared.
Step four: build simultaneously. The ₹2,000 SIP I started today stays untouched regardless of how tight the month gets. This is non-negotiable. Debt repayment cleans up the past. The SIP builds the future. Both run at the same time.
The target: debt free in approximately two years. By mid 2028, if the plan holds, the trading loans will be closed permanently.
That’s the plan. No shortcuts. No cleverness. Just discipline applied consistently for 24 months.
I have spent five years making this mess. I am giving myself two years to clean it up. That feels like a fair trade.
What I’d Tell Every PSU Employee Excited About F&O
If you are a PSU employee reading this and you have just opened a Zerodha account, or you are thinking about it — I want to say something directly to you.
Open it. Absolutely open it. Zerodha is a fine platform. Use it to buy index funds. Use it to hold quality stocks for the long term. Use it to build a SIP. Use the platform exactly the way it was meant to be used by a salaried employee with a stable income and a family depending on them.
But if someone calls you — an agent, a friend, a colleague, a YouTube influencer — and tells you that F&O trading is the shortcut to wealth, close that door immediately. Don’t open it. Not even to try. Not even with a small amount to “learn.”
Because that small amount becomes a larger amount. The larger amount becomes a loan. The loan becomes five years of your life.
F&O is not a retail game. It was never designed for salaried employees trading on the side between office hours. It is a professional arena — institutions, algorithms, full time traders with risk management systems and teams of analysts. You are not competing against beginners. You are competing against machines.
I am not saying this from theory. I am saying this from five years of sleepless nights, crying alone, and EMIs I didn’t know how to pay.
If making money through F&O was genuinely simple, every person on earth would already be a millionaire. They are not. And the people losing money in that market are mostly people exactly like us — salaried, hopeful, and completely unprepared for what we walked into.
Open Zerodha. Buy index funds. Hold them for twenty years.
That’s it. That’s the whole secret.
In my next article I’ll share exactly how I restarted my investments — starting with a ₹2,000 SIP today.
Read it here: How I Restarted My SIP After 5 Years
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