The importance of a solid retirement plan cannot be stressed enough. The importance of ‘stress testing’ a retirement plan also cannot be stressed enough! Here is an Excel Monte Carlo Retirement Calculator that allows you to do just that! If you wish to plan for your retirement, recognise its importance: The cost of postponing your…
Continue reading →Nandish Desai and Manish Chauhan run Jagoadvisor – a portal for financial advisors. Recently, they posed the following retirement planning challenge, Scenario: ‘You meet a 55 year old with a corpus of Rs. 70 lakhs. The person seeks financial independence in retirement and expects an annual inflation of about 8-9%. He would like to invest the corpus in…
Continue reading →Assume that I am speaking about ‘how to plan for retirement’ in a seminar (what were the organizers thinking! Asking a nut job like me to talk!) Let us say that more than half my audience consists of people (duh!) in their early 30s to mid 50s. I go on and on about the factors…
Continue reading →A retirement plan is a road map that helps you understand, plan and prepare for a financially independent life post-retirement. Well, that is what it is supposed to be! Unfortunately, each person’s retirement roadmap is unique. While past and peer experience can aid to a certain extent, it is entirely up to us to chart…
Continue reading →Here is a list of all the Excel-based free personal finance calculators available for download in the blog. This list will be available in a separate page in the navigation menu. If you see calculators you have not checked out before, do give them a try this weekend. If you find the calculators useful, please…
Continue reading →“How much should I invest/save for retirement?” is a pretty common question (try googling it). This question, like most other, is often asked with the expectation of a nice and comfortable answer. “Be sure to save 10-15% of what you make, for retirement” is an equally common answer. Unfortunately, nice and comforting as it may…
Continue reading →Just so you know, I am currently being investigated by the income tax department for discrepancies in my tax returns a couple of years ago! When I got the letter to appear before an IT official a few months back, I was too sick to do so and had to request a postponement. Me and…
Continue reading →This is a guest post by Jitendra Kumar, Sr.Business Analyst- Fiserv. Mr Kumar is a certified financial planner. His additional qualifications include MBA and Certification in Investment & Portfolio Mgmt. (IIMB). He is also a certified associate of the Indian institute of bankers (CAIIB). ~~~~~ Traditional Financial Planning works on certain assumptions on returns, risk, inflation, savings growth…
Continue reading →Rajesh Dalmia a certified financial planner and director of Mandar Learning Academy has authored an impressive do it yourself financial planning guide for investors to understand the basic features of insurance planning and goal-based investing. The guide has four excellent calculation charts that enable one to calculate Necessary life insurance cover Corpus’s needed for retirement,…
Continue reading →Last week I had posted a calculator to figure out which is better: (a). Pay off your home loan asap and then step up retirement investment or (b). Let the home loan run its natural course and invest as much as possible for retirement. I now post a revised version of this calculator with the…
Continue reading →Recently subra wrote an article on Payoff Mortgage or Invest…continued. Here is a calculator to fortify the argument I have modified my financial freedom calculator to accommodate immediate lump sum investment to the lender to check if that option is better than investing the money for retirement (aka financial freedom) The excel file explains the…
Continue reading →There are times when we have a large sum of money to be spent, not in one-shot, but over the course of a few years. Retirement of course is the most obvious and most complicated example wherein the corpus has to last from a few years to decades. There can other situations: a person who…
Continue reading →Worried that you will never be able to invest enough for retirement? Do the results of a retirement calculator scare you? Learning about the ‘bucket strategy’ might help cope with these issues. How much do I need to retire? Most people (among those who bother to ask!) are troubled by the answer to this question….
Continue reading →Manish Chauhan’s second book, “How to be your own financial planner in 10 steps” is a great ‘action’ book guiding people through the basic steps of financial planning. This post describes a retirement calculator inspired by the book and is based on ‘corpus withdrawal rate’ Step no. 6 is “Start your retirement planning”. In this…
Continue reading →1. Ignoring inflation after retirement! Many online calculators are guilty of this. A part of the problem stems from the over importance associated with ‘pension’ and assuming it will be a constant number during retirement. 2. Assuming expenses will go down post-retirement! A 30- or 40-year old making this assumption when retirement is still a long…
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