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 The EPFO circular clearly states that after two months of continuous unemployment 100% of the corpus can be withdrawn.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…

For a person who has been investing in equity (directly/indirectly) for several years, the question, “how much equity exposure should I have after retirement?” is not so hard to answer. However, that is not the case for most 50+ investors heading towards retirement. They would have little or no experience with equity or any market-related…

‘Can I invest in such a way that my capital is protected?’ is a question that many ask. Especially those who are retired, or about to retire. The answer is contextual. The term capital protection can take two meanings depending on how we use it. In this post, I discuss the disadvantages of capital protection,…

A catch-22 situation is one from which there are no easy solutions. Any move we make will be associated with significant disadvantages and risk. Such situations are often found in retirement planning. Whether you are a middle-aged employee heading towards retirement or a young earner trying to manage their parents’ retirement fund, understanding when a…

Given a lump sum, how do we invest it in order to create a reliable income stream that is risk-free and has the ability to keep pace with inflation? This is the most crucial question that concerns every person who is retired, nearing retirement, or planning for someone else’s retirement (a client or a parent…

Ever wondered why the retirement corpus we need is so large? Often unbelievably so. Is this a mistake in the math, in the assumptions or in the inputs? In this post, let us a discuss a simple illustration of a retirement calculation in order to understand why the corpus required is so large. Any calculation…

I see more and more young earners trying to manage the retirement corpus of their parents. In a way, this is healthy and in a way dangerous. Let us face it. Most retirement corpuses are not healthy enough. In the sense that one cannot wield them to generate an inflation-protected post-retirement income. This is especially…