This is the archive of all our articles related to retirement planning
Use this financial freedom calculator spreadsheet to answer questions like, “When can I retire?” and “When should I retire?” and hopefully understand the difference between them with minimal inputs. For a given age and life expectancy, along with other standard investment and inflation details, the years to retirement is calculated by determining when the monthly income…
Continue reading →Anyone who has used a retirement calculator would tell you the primary input is current expenses that are likely to persist in retirement. I have always maintained that one should not assume expenses will decrease after retirement! Therefore, I will only exclude cash outgo like EMI and expenses related to children from current expenses. This is all that one can do…
Continue reading →Budget 2016 has made annuity plans popular thanks to proposed taxation on EPF and the NPS. In its clarification about Changes made in the Tax Treatment for Recognised Provident Fund & National Pension System, the government claims It is expected that the employees of private companies will place the remaining 60% of the Corpus in…
Continue reading →‘In the light of budget 2016 recommendations, should I now switch or shift to the national pension scheme?’ More and more EPF and other pension scheme subscriber are asking this question. While it is clear that we need to wait for the budget recommendations to become a law, here are some important points to keep in…
Continue reading →Here is an EPF calculator in Excel that helps illustrate the new EPF withdrawal rules. With effect from 10th Feb. 2016, EPF subscribers can only withdraw their contribution and the interest it earns in the EPF account if they quit their job before the age of 57. The employer contribution and the interest earned from it…
Continue reading →Here is a set of slides on retirement planning that I have used at the investor workshops. The aim is to convey the importance of retirement planning in a few slides to young earners. 1. Imagine how your monthly income will evolve in the future The abrupt stoppage in income represents retirement. 2. Now imagine…
Continue reading →Here is a simple tool to check if you are on track to early retirement. It is also suitable for normal retirement and will work on Google sheets as well. Users can enter the current value of the corpus from online portfolio trackers. It is basically an Excel retirement calculator, with a focus on tracking….
Continue reading →I am sick and tired of fluctuating equity returns. Why can’t I use recurring deposits and fixed deposits to build my retirement corpus? How would you answer such a question? I would say, Yes, you absolutely can do so! To make my point clearer, let us run through a specific retirement corpus calculation. A more…
Continue reading →Download a free early retirement calculator for India with a checklist to retire early in India. You can also down a free e-book to plan early retirement. When I earlier asked “Is it possible to retire early in India?“, many readers assumed that I meant early retirement is not possible in India. All I wanted to…
Continue reading →The low-stress retirement calculator is now available as an android app from the Google Play store. Do give it a try and if you like it, please share. rate and review it. The app takes into account all your existings investments (equity, EPF, PPF, Fds etc.) to compute the corpus required to generate an inflation protected income…
Continue reading →A look at investment options for Indian Senior citizens, taking into consideration, tax, liquidity, capital preservation and ability to generate an increasing pension. This is a dangerous topic to broach! Before retirement, volatility is a friend and inflation a mandatory benchmark for a portfolio return to surpass. After retirement, volatility can either be a friend…
Continue reading →After reading well-spun yarn like ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, many start talking about the importance of financial independence and passive income. There is no free lunch in the universe and there is no such thing called ‘passive’ income. A look at some well-known passive income ‘streams’ and what it takes to make them count. Income…
Continue reading →A look at ‘how much’ or ‘what is the corpus required for early retirement in India?’. I had earlier written a detailed post on this subject and the common misconceptions youngsters seeking financial freedom form after reading blogs like ERE and MMM. The central message of that post was, early retirement is possible, but one…
Continue reading →So many people have told me, one should assume that expenses will decrease after retirement due to a change in lifestyle, that I am now convinced that it is a cognitive response to avoid pain. The pain associated with staring at the results of a retirement calculation made with meaningful inputs. It is abject cluelessness when a…
Continue reading →Nearly three years ago, I was introduced to an interesting idea in goal-based investing by Chenthil Iyer, Horus financials. You invest a monthly sum of X in a single portfolio for all financial goals. The portfolio is allowed to grow and when the time for each goal arrives, the necessary sum is withdrawn. The final…
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