New Delhi, May 14 -- A Systematic investment plan (SIP) is a realistic and long-term option for most retail investors to build a significant corpus in mutual funds. An SIP allows investors to deduct a fixed amount into your preferred mutual fund scheme each month and also helps build financial discipline for the long run.

When you invest in a mutual fund scheme, the returns keep getting added to the corpus, thus letting it grow faster in the later years vis-a-vis initial years. The overall corpus, therefore, jumps at a rate faster than it did in the first few years. The faster pace of growth of a scheme's AUM in the later years is also known as 'compounding'.

In fact, delaying SIPs by 10 or even five years can have significant impact on...