How a retirement planning calculation scared me to take action

Most investors calculate the investment amount required for their retirement and in for a rude shock. Sleepless nights are quite common! Very few investors manage their finances right after such a shock and start investing with focus and conviction. In this episode of ‘reader audit’, we meet Mr Tinker (name withheld on request), who got…

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Building the ideal retirement portfolio that goes beyond money

“How much money do I need to retire comfortably?” is the central question of retirement planning. Comfortably refers to (1) generating an income that will keep pace with inflation; (2) having some buffer in the corpus to handled unexpected expenses (recurring or one-time). However, there is more to retirement planning than just money and that…

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How falling interest rates and lower equity returns can affect a retirement plan

With the repo rate at its lowest, fixed-income investment rates which were already heading south over the last few years are likely to stay there and move down further in future. Equity returns have been consistently heading lower and lower too. This can destroy all financial plans especially retirement which does not come with a…

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Crash destroyed my 12 year equity MF gains but this is time to invest more!

Last week I had reported that the annualized return (XIRR) of all my equity MF transactions tagged to retirement planning goal (or financial freedom) dropped from 11.6% in Dec 2019 to 2.75% after the crash.  Some readers were either disheartened about this or twisted the result to point out equity investing is risky. In this…

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