Retirement Planning

Retirement planning fails most often not because people invest badly, but because they never turn 'I should save for retirement' into an actual number. The first real step is estimating your future monthly expenses — not your current ones. If you spend ₹50,000/month today and retire in 25 years, at 6% inflation that same lifestyle costs roughly ₹2.15 lakh/month by the time you get there.

The second step is estimating how long retirement needs to last. With life expectancy rising, a 30-year retirement (say, retiring at 60, living to 90) is a realistic planning assumption, not a pessimistic one. That means your retirement corpus doesn't just need to cover your first year of expenses — it needs to keep growing enough to outpace inflation across three full decades of withdrawals.

Once you have a target corpus, work backward to a monthly SIP. This is where most people are surprised: reaching a ₹4-5 crore retirement corpus is very achievable starting in your late 20s or early 30s with a moderate monthly SIP, but the required monthly amount roughly doubles for every decade you delay starting.

One overlooked detail: your equity allocation should generally decrease as retirement approaches. Money you'll withdraw within the next 3-5 years shouldn't be sitting in volatile equity — a market downturn right before or during early retirement can permanently damage a retirement plan in a way it wouldn't for a 30-year-old with decades to recover.