Last Updated on February 16, 2025 at 7:31 am
A reader asks, “I will turn 55 this year and would like to retire in 2025. How do I find the corpus required if my monthly expenses are close to Rs. 1 lakh?”
We shall use the freefincal robo advisor tool for this exercise. The retirement corpus is assumed to be invested in five buckets. Please note that the numbers provided below represent an example. The output of the robo tool depends on multiple inputs. So please do not extrapolate these numbers or percentages for your situation without a full retirement planning calculation.
- Assumed life expectancy of younger spouse 90
- Inflation during retirement (%) 6
- Years to retirement 0 (immediate retirement)
- Monthly expenses in the first year of retirement: 1,00,000
- Years in retirement (until younger spouse reaches age 90) 35 (we have assumed both partners are currently 55)
The minimum corpus required for a comfortable retirement is Rs. 3.55 Crores. All numbers are approximate and rounded off.
- An emergency bucket to handle unexpected expenses about 5%: Say Rs. 16 Lakhs
- An income bucket provides guaranteed income for the first 15 years of retirement. About 54% of the remaining corpus, or Rs. 1.92 Crores, is invested here. There is no equity exposure in this bucket.
- During this time (first 15 years), investments are made in three buckets: low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk.
- The buckets will be actively managed to reduce risk: rebalancing and profit booking from one bucket to another. To understand how this works, try 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.
Details of the other buckets are given below.
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- Corpus from a low-risk bucket that provides retirement income from year 16 to year 25. To provide this income, the low-risk bucket will have an asset allocation of 40% equity and 60% debt during the investment period (years 1 to 15 of retirement). About 27% or Rs. 95 lakhs is invested here.
- Corpus from a medium-risk bucket will provide retirement income from year 26 to year 30. 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 25). About 9% or Rs. 31 lakhs is invested here.
- Corpus from a high-risk bucket will provide retirement income from year 31 to year 35. To provide this income, this bucket shall have an asset allocation of 100% equity during the investment period (year 1 to year 30). About 6% or Rs. 20 lakhs is invested here.
The overall equity exposure is only 33%, excluding the emergency bucket, and therefore is reasonably safe. The inflation assumed is 6%, the expected post-tax return from equity is 9%, and the expected post-tax return from fixed income is 5% (for bucket investments).
For the income bucket, we have assumed a fixed income return of 5% for the first 25 years and 4% for the last 15 years -all these numbers can be varied at will by the user in the settings page of the robo advisory tool.
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