The supreme court recently ruled that allowances that are ordinarily paid to all employes should be considered for deciding the EPF contribution and not just the basic pay as usually done. This means normal allowances like house rent, dearness transport, fall under the definition of “basic wages”. A look at how much your EPF corpus…

In a circular issued today, Dec. 19th, the EPFO allowed members who have not been employed for at least one month to withdraw up to 75% of their provident corpus. The EPFO circular clearly states that after two months of continuous unemployment 100% of the corpus can be withdrawn. There has been some confusion in this…

More and more young earners are asking questions such as “My father will be retiring with 40 lakhs how should he invest?” Let us discuss strategies of retirement planning for senior citizens. Here is how your parents can invest their nest egg after retirement. As an example, I consider a question asked by a reader…

Almost every EPF member who was part of the EPFO before Sep 1st 2014 has one or all these questions on their minds: Will I get higher EPS pension? Am I eligible for it if I am already retired? How much will my EPS pension increase? I can answer, the “am I eligible” question accurately (see…

Find out how much your EPS pension will increase with this Excel calculator if you contribute 8.33% of your full salary (basic +DA) instead of Rs. 1250 per month which is 8.33% of Rs. 15,000 the current salary ceiling mandated by the EPFO. Last week, a 1200%  hike in pension for Mr. Praveen Kohli following an October…

The employee pension scheme (EPS) is a component of the employee provident fund that provides a pension to its subscribers. Yesterday, news about how Mr. Praveen Kohli got a 1200% hike in pension created a stir. This was because, in October 2016, the Supreme Court directed the EPFO to increase the pension of 12 petitioners as…

In this post, I discuss reader Abhay Deol’s question: As anyone who has played with a retirement calculator knows, the corpus required for the retirement portfolio is huge. And from all accounts, most Indians are not prepared for it or even realize the huge amount required. What I’m curious about though is why hasn’t this crisis played…