The first time Arjun Amlani used an online calculator to assess his retirement needs, he was shocked. The Mumbai-based finance professional, whose gross income was around Rs 10 lakh a year then, needed more than Rs 8 crore to fund his retirement needs. "The eight-digit number was too scary," he says.
Figures thrown up by excel sheets and online retirement calculators can be intimidating. Here's an example: if your current monthly expenses are Rs 60,000, even a conservative inflation rate of 7% will push up that requirement to over Rs 4.6 lakh in 30 years. To sustain those expenses for 20 years in retirement, you need a corpus of Rs 9 crore. To some investors, such enormous figures seem so unattainable that they just stop bothering about retirement. That's a mistake.Retirement cannot be wished away. The paycheques will stop coming, and your living expenses won't end but keep rising due to inflation. Worse, critical expenses like healthcare will be growing faster than overall inflation. The sooner you start saving for that phase of life, the more comfortable retirement will be.
