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…

While planning for retirement, we encounter several rates: rate of return before  and after retirement rate of inflation before and after retirement While calculating the corpus required and the monthly investment required, we assume these rates are constant for each year before retirement and during retirement. In reality, all these rates can vary quite a…

Given a lump sum, how does one generate an income from it? How do we tackle inflation in retirement? Not too long ago, I was under the impression that such questions are asked only by senior citizens.  I soon realized the problem is extremely common. Many children are trying to optimize income from their parents retirement…

Last week I wrote about an inflation protected income can be generated by dividing a corpus into 4/5 portions and investing each into financial instruments of varying risk and tenure, while setting up an income ladder for the first few years. As the investment in each bucket matures a new income ladder will be set up…

Retirement planning is the single most important financial goal common to every individual.  It is the only financial goal in which a corpus would get spent over the course of decades! Retirement planning is simply non-negotiable.  The cost of postponing systematic retirement planning is more dangerous than inflation. Regular readers would be aware of that…