This article forms a part of my extensive ebook: “How to Save Money – When the Times Are Tough”, in which I have given a practical, simple and no-nonsense approach to fighting the economic setback primarily in terms of its effect on an individual’s life, simply my and your life as a single entity, not as a crowd or society, or state or country, just an individual. What I have focussed on in the ebook, are multiple, extremely practical ways to drastically reduce wasteful spending from your life and multiply your savings. Wasting money on useless supplements is one of them.

One of my biggest endeavors through my YouTube channel (We R Stupid) has been to bust most of the useless supplements being sold in gyms and to athletes in various sports in the name of fat loss, muscle recovery and performance enhancement.

Supplements like glutamine, BCAA, chromium, garcinia, green coffee beans, CLA, L-Carnitine, apple cider vinegar, raspberry ketones etc. either don’t work or they don’t work for the purpose they are sold in the market. Despite of the fact that these supplements are proven worthless in hundreds of studies, they are being openly sold by supplement companies and supplement dealers, and promoted by various quack fitness influencers and coaches.

Supplement industry is a million dollar industry and they won’t accept the lies ever till they are legally banned, and in most cases they never will, because these supplements are not regulated by any authority. In simple terms you are at your own risk if you consume them.

So, you have a double whammy. You are paying thousands of rupees on absolutely useless supplements, and on top of that if something happens, you are yourself responsible. That’s how smart the companies are and how dumb we are.

There are people on various social media channels like YouTube, Instagram &Facebook, who are telling you about supplement stacks for beginners, stacks of this and stack for that. What’s exactly inside these so called ‘stacks’ is a combination of all useless supplements being sold by these people purely for profits. Now, each of these supplements can cost you somewhere from a thousand or fifteen hundred to six to eight thousand rupees. A stack may easily set you back by well over 10-20k or more, every month. So, you are not just losing money but also losing health.

That’s the beauty of false marketing. Companies can sell you shit and they make sure you get convinced and eat it.

Now, have you ever tried and added this expenditure to your savings and seen the result? Let me shock you.

Heard of PPF? PPF is must investment for most people. PPF or Public Provident Fund is a tax-free savings scheme offered by the Government of India, wherein interest on the account is set for every quarter and is paid by the government.The applicable interest rate on PPF for the first quarter of the year, 2020-21 i.e.from 1st April to 31st June 2020 has been fixed at 7.1%. The interest rate for January to March 2020 was 7.9%.

At the rate of app. 7%, if I deposit 12,500/month (max. amount you can deposit in PPF is 1,50,000/year), for 20 years, the total amount you are going to get is a whopping over 66 lakh. Increase the time period by just 5 years i.e. 25 years, it increases to a whopping 1 crore plus, and further adding 5 years, it makes to over 1.5 crore. Compounding the amount to further 5 years give you over 2.2 crore and then over 3.2 crore and so on. And all this is totally tax free.

Now, let’s say at the age of 20, you start depositing 12.5k every month, and forget about the investment. Imagine the corpus you are going to obtain at the age of 50 or 60, without making any investments. Now imagine the massive wasteful expenditure in these useless supplements people are doing and what they can make out of it.