Retirement planning requires careful and systematic planning. As we shift from one stage of life to another, from wealth accumulation to spending phase, we need to change our strategy. It requires us to select and follow right strategy pre and post retirement. In pre-retirement period we need to avoid common investment mistakes which may in turn hamper our post retirement life. To ensure we successfully achieve our retirement goal, lets discuss few of the basic steps to be followed now.
1. Know your current spending
For successful life post retirement, we need to be financial independent. Knowing how much we will need post retirement on a regular basis for our monthly expenses is essential for financial independence. It depends on our current life style. Keeping a track of how much we spend now and if we continue the same standard of living post retirement then how much of this will be needed. It helps us to be prepared well and know how much corpus will suffice for generating this amount of regular expenses. For example, Assuming our post retirement expenses is Rs.50000 and it will be needed for next 30 years post retirement. To generate Rs.50000 p.m. income for next 30 years, assuming 9% investment rate and 6% inflation rate, the corpus needed assuming you are retiring today is Rs.1.21 Cr.
2. Estimate how long you will survive
Another important piece of information required for successful retirement planning is estimating life expectancy. If you make mistake in estimating life expectancy, then it can be very costly. In the post retirement period your saving should last till you survive. The biggest risk we face in retirement life is living too long. Because of medical advancement life expectancy is increasing continuously. It’s important to be conservative while estimating for life post retirement. On an average the we should ideally plan for 85 or 90 and depending average life expectancy in your family.
3. Plan for goals post retirement
Major outflows can affect our retirement corpus. Mainly the risk of medical or other goals are the big risk we face post retirement. Ideally we should anticipate theses expenses in advance and there should be a separate corpus to be created for all the goals including medical emergency corpus.
4. Anticipate Increase in cost of living
Inflation is the biggest enemy of retirement life across the world. Due to high inflation and negative real return people are facing tough situation post retirement. We need to be well prepared to deal with inflation. Earning more than inflation during pre and post retirement should be our goal. By investing in risky assets we can earn higher returns in the early years of life. Post retirement diversify your regular income with inflation hedged source of earning. Dividend income, rental income etc. are expected to grow equal to or more than inflation. So ideally our retirement earning should be mix of interest, dividend and rental income.
5. Review your risk appetite
By not taking risk we take bigger risk. So ideally when we are younger and in the initial years of our working life, we should take more risk. Which will help us to generate higher than inflation returns. And eases pressure on investment amount. With lesser amount and higher returns we can achieve our retirement corpus easily. And post retirement as well we should diversify our portfolio to generate higher and positive real returns.
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