Last Updated on February 12, 2022 at 6:13 pm
A reader who wishes to be anonymous wanted to know the corpus need to retire in India by age 45. Before we get down to the calculation, “retire by 45” requires some clarification.
This means goodbye to regular employment, to a salaried job. This does not mean the person will sit around all day doing nothing. She can still be self-employed but does not depend on that income for day to day expenses. This is also the definition of early retirement, but the way things are going, retiring by 45 could become the new normal in some sectors!
Since our reader does not wish any personal details to be published, we will have to work with some generic information and punch them into the freefincal robo advisory template.
Our reader is aged 30. If she were ten years younger, the calculation is simpler and quite a bit approximate. If X is her annual expenses, for zero real return (return after quitting = inflation), the approximate corpus required is X multiplied by the number of years she expects to stay alive after quitting.
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For example, if her annual expenses are Rs. 6 lakh at age 45, then for 6% return on the entire corpus after tax and 6% inflation, she needs 2.7 Crores for her corpus to last 45 years (age 45 to age 90).
This means, each year after quitting, she withdraws expenses for that year (increasing each year by 6%), and the rest of the corpus is managed so that it earns about 6% after-tax overall.
However, at age 30, these kind of rough estimates are not useful. The user must have a precise idea of how the retirement corpus will be deployed into different buckets. The user must have a solid plan to counter sequences of return risk. That is a stretch of poor returns in equity which can destroy early retirement plans. See: Want to be financially free? Do not count on frugality! Worry about sequence of returns risk!
The robo advisory template was specifically designed to test early and normal retirement feasibility rigorously and is currently used by more than 550 investors and financial advisors. It is fully customizable by the user.
Let us consider the following scenario of immediate retirement. The person has some corpus saved up and wishes to know if she is ready to retire immediately or in the next couple of years. If you are younger and wish to see the same illustration for future retirement, see: I am 30 and wish to retire by 50; how should I plan my investments?
Retirement by age 45
Scenario 1
- Annual Expense: Rs. 6 lakh
- Inflation during retirement 6% <= This is the most important Indian-centric input.
- Life expectancy: 90 (the template uses this for the younger spouse if married)
- Total Corpus in hand Rs. Two Crores
- No other income source to be used.
Can this person retire at 45? Yes. This is how the corpus should be deployed into different buckets.
The retirement corpus is assumed to be invested in five buckets.
- An emergency bucket to handle unexpected expenses.
- Income bucket providing guaranteed income for the first 15 years in retirement. During this time, investments are made in the following three buckets.
- Corpus from a low-Risk bucket that provides income from year 16 to year 26 in retirement. To provide this income, the low-risk bucket will have an asset allocation of 30% equity 70% debt during the investment period (year 1 to 15 of retirement).
- Corpus from a medium risk bucket will provide income from year 27 to 35 in retirement. To provide this income, this bucket shall have an asset allocation of 50% equity and 50% debt during the investment period (year 1 to year 26)
- Corpus from a high-risk bucket will provide income from year 36 to 45 in retirement. To provide this income, this bucket shall have an asset allocation of 70% equity and 30% debt during the investment period (year 1 to year 35)
That is, the retirement corpus will be divided into five parts.
- 5% in an emergency bucket
- 45% in an income bucket will provide guaranteed risk-free income inflation-protected income for the first 15 years. The rest of the parts will be invested in three buckets: low-risk (25%), medium-risk (13%) and high-risk (11%) in the asset allocations indicated above. During this investment period, the buckets will be actively managed to reduce risk: rebalancing and profit booking from one bucket to another. To understand how this works, try this: The Retirement Bucket Strategy Simulator.
- After 15 years, the low-risk bucket will be turned into 100% debt and provide income for about 11 years. After that, the other buckets will also be progressively used. One can always customize this usage after retirement.
This is a schematic from a previously published illustration: Creating a retirement income plan for 27-year old Amar. Please note that bucket allocations will change as per the age profile of the user. So the numbers shown in the figure will vary from what is presented above.
The detailed calculation tells you two crores is enough for retiring by age 45 while the approximate calculation is off by 70 lakhs. Now that we have calculators available why get wrong results by using thumb rules?!
Scenario 2
What if the annual expenses increased to Rs. 7,20,000 (Rs. 50,000 a month + another Rs 1,20,000 a year). Will she able to retire at age 45 with Rs. Two crores corpus?
No, the template tells you another Rs. 37 lakhs is necessary. There are two options. You can plan or include a source of income (from freelancing, dividends, rent etc. – template supports three such income streams), or you use the DIY bucket calculator sheet and tweak the settings.
In this case, the shortfall is only Rs. 37 lakhs, so tweaking the bucket settings to make it work with two crores is reasonable. But if the shortfall is higher, then including an income source (or delaying retirement) is the only option.
In this present case, if the reader can supplement this two crore corpus with an annual income of Rs. Three lakh (which is quite reasonable), she will be able to retire at 45. The template allows you to consider a rate of increase in this incomes after retirement (we have set this to zero here).
You might be surprised that retirement at age 55/60 requires 5-7 crores, but a person wishing to retire at 45 can get away with a corpus of only two crores! This is due to inflation of current expenses resulting in higher withdrawals. See: Retire early to lower your retirement corpus!
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