This is the archive of all our articles related to retirement planning
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…
Continue reading →Should a subscriber be given the option to make partial withdrawals from a pension plan? The EPFO always allowed it. That is how mom and dad funded my education! Which, many argue is the main reason why retirees do not have much of a corpus to speak of! Now the pension fund regulatory and development…
Continue reading →A newspaper knows how to get your attention! The economic times carried an article yesterday titled, “EPFO may have ruined your retirement plans. Here’s how”. For its standards, the article makes the sensible conclusion that young people should invest enough in equity. The subject of the article is the following: EPFO will now invest 5%…
Continue reading →Use this sheet to generate a schedule of future EPF and EPS contributions. It uses the new salary threshold of Rs. 15,000 and include the three ways in which the contributions are computed if the basic salary is above the threshold. Pratheek John suggested this would be more useful than the EPF corpus calculator published…
Continue reading →Here is a simple EPF corpus calculator derived out of the retirement calculator sheets. The corpus calculation is the same as any SIP calculator. Just that we need to factor in increasing contributions due to a salary increase and the correct total EPF contribution from salary. The formula used for total contribution (employee+employer) has been…
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