I run Securis, so you’d expect me to tell you to borrow. I won’t — not always. Plenty of times the right move is to dip into family savings and skip us entirely. But there’s a specific, common situation where reaching for the family fixed deposit is the more expensive choice, even though it feels free. I want to walk through the actual math on that, because most families never run it.

The instinct is understandable. There’s ₹1,50,000 sitting in a parent’s FD, your son or daughter needs ₹85,000 for a laptop or a certification, and borrowing at 14-18% looks absurd when the money is right there. Why pay interest when you don’t have to?

Because the money isn’t actually free. It’s just that the cost is invisible.

The cost of savings is real — it’s just hidden

When you pull money out of a fixed deposit, three things happen, and only one of them shows up on a statement.

First, you stop earning on it. An FD today returns somewhere around 6.5-7.5% a year. Pull ₹1,00,000 out and you’ve quietly given up roughly ₹7,000 of interest over the next twelve months. Nobody sends you a bill for that, so nobody counts it. But it’s a real number.

Second — and this is the one I care about most — you lose the buffer. Family savings exist for a reason. A medical emergency, a job gap, a sudden travel need. The moment that ₹85,000 leaves the account to buy a laptop, it isn’t there for the thing you can’t predict. Rebuilding it takes months of disciplined saving, and most families never quite get back to where they were.

Third, there’s a softer cost that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet but is real in every Indian household: the obligation. Money taken from family carries a weight that money taken from an NBFC doesn’t. It comes up at dinner. It shapes the next three conversations about your career choices. A formal loan, paid in clean monthly EMIs, is sometimes the less complicated option precisely because it’s a transaction, not a favour.

Let’s do the actual math

Take a realistic case: ₹1,00,000 needed, repaid over 12 months. On a Securis personal loan at, say, 16% APR (reducing balance), the EMI works out to about ₹9,073 a month, and the total you pay back is roughly ₹1,08,877 — so about ₹8,877 in interest over the full year.

Now compare that honestly against using the FD. If that same ₹1,00,000 was sitting in a deposit at 7%, pulling it out costs you about ₹7,000 in forgone interest over the same year.

Weighing a loan against the family FD? Apply for a Securis loan — typical disbursement is 1-2 working days, and you’ll see your exact EMI before you commit to anything.

So the true extra cost of borrowing instead of raiding savings isn’t ₹8,877. It’s the difference: roughly ₹1,877 over the year, or about ₹156 a month. That’s what you actually pay to keep your family’s emergency buffer intact and untouched. For a lot of households, ₹156 a month is a sensible price for not gutting the one cushion they have. For others, it isn’t — and that’s fine too. The point is that the honest comparison is ₹1,877, not ₹8,877, and almost nobody does that subtraction.

There’s a fourth thing the loan quietly does, especially for a young borrower: it builds a credit history. Twelve clean EMIs on a small loan is a real, visible track record. The first time you need a bigger loan — a home, a car, a business — that history is what gets you a better rate. Money pulled from a parent’s FD builds nothing on your file.

The three times you should just use the savings

I’d be doing my job badly if I didn’t tell you when to ignore everything above and use the FD.

When the amount is small relative to the buffer. If a family has ₹8,00,000 in savings and the need is ₹40,000, the buffer argument collapses — pulling 5% of a healthy cushion doesn’t leave you exposed. Just use the money. Paying interest to preserve a buffer you aren’t meaningfully denting is pointless.

When the savings are genuinely idle. Some money sits in a low-interest savings account earning 2.5-3%, not a 7% FD, with no purpose attached to it. If that’s the case, the forgone-interest cost is tiny and there’s no emergency role being played. Borrowing against truly idle money rarely makes sense.

When the ticket is large enough to need a different product entirely. This is important and I’ll be blunt about it: a Securis personal loan is built for the ₹10K-₹2L gap — laptops, course fees, exam prep, internship setup. If you’re funding ₹5,00,000 of tuition, a personal loan is the wrong instrument. That’s a job for your bank’s education loan desk, which prices secured, long-tenure education lending far better than any unsecured personal loan can. Don’t stretch a small-ticket product to do a big-ticket job, and don’t drain the family savings for it either — talk to a bank.

The honest summary

Family savings aren’t free; they cost forgone interest, a lost emergency buffer, and a quieter family ledger of obligation. A small personal loan converts all of that into one clean, predictable number you can see in advance. When the need is a meaningful chunk of the family’s cushion, when the savings are actually working in an FD, and when the amount sits in our small-ticket range, the loan is often the smarter call even though it looks more expensive on the surface. When it’s a rounding error against a big buffer, or the money’s just sitting idle, use the savings and move on.

Run your own subtraction before you decide. The number that matters is the difference, not the headline interest.

If you want a second opinion on your specific situation, WhatsApp us — we’ll be honest about whether Securis fits.