retirement

How much do you actually need for retirement

Financial Independence, Uncategorized

I don’t know the answer. For each of you it will be different.  So you need to find it out for yourself.

So why this post.

Recently I was having lunch with one of my colleague who is just crossed 60. He was talking about how he had a discussion with a relative on what is needed after retirement.

So he had the following calculation:

If he needs Rs100000/- per month then he will need Rs12,00,000/- in a year.

If he is in the 30%+ tax bracket then he has to account for tax, which means he should make approximately Rs18,00,000/-.

If he has a fixed deposit which will give him 7% RoI then he will need a corpus of Rs26,000,000/-. Now since he is no where close to this figure he was getting depressed on how he will handle the situation.

For all of you who live out of India, the retirement age in India in most offices is either 58 or 60. Some jobs do have 65 as the age.  Private companies do have people working after the age of 58 but that is on contract, not as a full time employee with all the benefits. Even in India the average age of both males and females has been going up every decade. In the cities especially with access to better medical treatment, the average age has crossed 70 now.  Which means a lot of people in the cities will now live to cross 85.

Being an absolute optimist I highlighted a few things that were flawed in his argument.

  1. The tax rate is different once a person crosses a certain age level in India.
  2. 30% tax on the whole amount does not include the deductions which the government allows as standard to all citizens.  So the taxation is rarely on all your income.
  3. While its good to have a large portion of your money in a fixed deposit, so that you are saved from the fluctuations of the stock market, it does not mean that you should have all your money in such low interest yielding paper. There are a lot of decently safe options which could give you safety as well as a higher rate of interest.
  4. You need to account for inflation especially medical inflation in India which is going crazy.
  5. You need to have a financial advisor who can suggest you ways to come into the lowest tax bracket.

If you were to take all the above items into account then the figure may not be the depressing number of 26,000,000/- given above.  It could be almost 30-40% lower.  That got my colleague a little relaxed.

Having given the above example however the fact remains that after retirement, you may want to travel across the country or abroad.  How do you finance those spendings?

For an India perspective, I would suggest you read the book by Saurabh Mukherjea Coffee Can Investing.  He has taken some very specific cases and built a hypothesis of how you should be investing to get to spend your old age well. At a broad level his belief is that for taking part in the stock market without risking majorly, ETFs are the best bet because they have low expense ratios(in one of my earlier post I have shown how an incremental 1-2% difference in returns because of expenses charged by mutual fund houses can impact your returns dramatically).  However for the small cap stocks he still recommends using some of the renowned mutual funds.

For all my readers from the US and Canada, I will not tire of recommending Tony Robbins’ book Money Master the Game.  Its a thick book but it’s a book which will give answers to a lot of your queries.  Most of the so called advisors don’t answer the questions adequately well.  Tony has been able to get you answers from some of the best people in the world who handle trillions of dollars combined.  He has also given a perfect asset allocation breakup.  Also all the advisors are very clear first on not losing money.  And last they all suggest index funds again because of low expense ratios.

All of us have to retire one day. Death and taxes are the only 2 realities of life.  How you manage your taxes and investments so that you live well, till you die. The earlier you start investing the better off you will be in the later stages of your life.  I have been giving various examples of how compounding can do magic even if you don’t earn much – if you start early and invest in decently size returns.

Till next time then…find out how much you would need to retire and then work backwards to achieve it.  Have a life.

Carpe Diem!!!

 

Are you covered to live past 90 years

Financial Independence, Uncategorized

I had gone to Lucknow ( capital of the state of UP in India) last week for celebrating the Golden Anniversary of one of my in-laws.  In their house they have a decent size lawn and also a lot of pots and trees in the garden.

While sitting in the garden, having my coffee I noticed an old man mowing the lawn with a manual lawn mower.  Since you don’t get to see a manual lawn mower too often these days I got talking with my in-laws about it.

That’s when my in-laws mentioned that the gardener was in his 90s and peddled down on a bicycle about 17 km everyday to come to their house and do the gardening. He does gardening in about 5 lawns in the vicinity and spends an hour at each location. He earns about 5000-7000 INR every month- about USD 900 /annum.

The positives from the interaction were that he was so healthy and fit even at 90.  He was able to move large pots around even though I would never be able to lift those plots.  I felt extremely happy to see a 90 year old, so healthy and independent.   I did not get an opportunity to talk to him because I got caught up in some other engagements there.

However it got me thinking, would he want to do this activity if he had the financial freedom. Was he working because he had to earn his daily bread or what were his circumstances at home which pushed him to travel 365 days on a bicycle to earn such a meagre amount.

When I visited Canada in 2017 in one of the department store I saw ladies at the cash counters who in my opinion were more than 70 years working on the basic minimum wage only because they did not have any savings to last them their remaining life. Yesterday I met one of my old colleagues who is now settled in the USA and he mentioned that the official retirement age in the US is now 67.5 years.  So as countries are ageing they are trying to increase the official working age.  But for countries like India where the population is still very young, the increase in retirement age from 58-60 in most cases is still afar cry.

Globally the average age of the people is increasing with better nutrition and medical support. If Dr. Peter Diamandis is to be believed in the next decade the breakthroughs in science will help people live well over a hundred years.  However the working life of an individual is only about 30-40 years while they will have to support themselves without an active income for the next 30 odd years.

Just with pure saving instruments its not feasible to beat inflation and grow your money.  You need to be investing money on a regular basis from a very young age so that the you can get the benefits of compounding.  If you will notice Warren Buffet’s dramatic growth in wealth has been after he crossed the age of 60 because the compounding equation is an exponential equation and as the number of years goes up the impact on your investment is dramatic.  He started investing in his early teens, so close to 70 years of compounding has made one of the richest men on the planet.  At around the same age our gardener is still trying to earn USD 900/- per annum because he did not make investments.

Compounding is such a simple equation that grade 7 students are taught in school mathematics.  However our teachers are not able to show the implications of that equation because what is simple is not always easy to comprehend and most people inspite of knowing it don’t apply it ever.

I would strongly recommend everyone to read the book “The Compoound Effect” by Darren Hardy to see the benefits of compounding in all walks of life.

Use this simple equation to make your life easy for the long run and be secure to live well beyond 90 years.

Carpe Diem!!!