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…

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…

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%…

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…

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…

Here is how people react when they use a retirement calculator for the first time. Fear! Most online calculators do not allow you to increase the investment amount each year. So I made one for myself and punched in the numbers. The results scared the living daylights out of me. I sent the sheet to Subra…

Freefincal has its origins in retirement calculators. For a long while, all I did was to make different variations of retirement sheets, input my numbers and stare at the results.  Soon I went on to make different inflation-protected income generators  The idea here is to divide the retirement corpus into different buckets. Some buckets are fixed…

The sooner you retire, lower the retirement corpus necessary for financial freedom!* * terms and conditions apply! Let us consider this counterintuitive aspect of retirement calculators in this post,  which stems from Sudhindra Aithal’s comment on this topic in response to the low-stress retirement calculator. Let us consider a 30-year-old, Dagwood Bumstead who wishes to…

Track the monthly growth of your retirement corpus with this Excel sheet. The user will have to first use the retirement calculator. The inputs of this sheet are used for tracking the corpus each month. The monthly investment made in equity (stocks or mf) taxable debt tax-free debt any other instrument should be entered by…

The first brush with a retirement calculator is typically memorable, if not unforgettable(!) for pretty much all investors – including ones who do not take them seriously. The typical responses would be, ‘Why do I need such a huge corpus for retirement?’ ‘How do you expect me to invest this high an amount each month?’…

LIC agents  are busy advertising  the Varishtha Pension Bima Yojana. An annuity product which would hand out a ‘pension’ against a lump sum payment at an annual return of a little more than 9%. Here is why you should not consider any pension product at face value. The pension received is typically constant for life. If…