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…

Continue reading →

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…

Continue reading →

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…

Continue reading →

Fixed Income Investment Options For Accumulating Retirement Corpus

Everyone agrees that a good amount of equity exposure is necessary for building a retirement corpus capable of handling inflation when income from employment stops. This can be done via some mix of equity mutual funds and direct equity. What about the fixed income or debt part of the portfolio? Let us consider the investment…

Continue reading →