RETIREMENT PLANNING – ADDRESSING KEY CHALLENGES USING A DUAL APPROACH

Indian retirees often get stuck between safety of capital and guaranteed income on one hand and, beating inflation, growing the corpus and making it last over the lifetime, on the other hand. A dual approach using a judicious mix of fixed income bearing instruments, market-linked debt mutual funds and dynamic asset allocation funds might help in ensuring that money doesn’t come in the way of your dream retirement

- Alok Agarwala

Retirement Planning, though prevalent in the western world since long, is a relatively new phenomenon in the Indian society. The joint family system where a son took care of his parents, obliterated the need for retirement planning. A competent son used to be the best investment Indian couples made for retirement.

However, this has changed with the advent of urbanization, employment-led migration, nuclear families and rising aspiration levels of young Indian couples. Retirement planning has become a necessity in Indian society today.

Retirement Planning typically consists of two phases –

1. Accumulation Phase

2. Distribution Phase

Accumulation Phase, as the name suggests, is the period before retirement, when a person accumulates or builds the corpus for his / her retirement, known as Retirement Corpus.

Distribution phase is the period after retirement when the accumulated retirement corpus is invested in a manner that assures safety of capital, liquidity and a regular, guaranteed stream of lifelong income that can grow with inflation.

While enough literature is available on the accumulation phase, not much has been said about the distribution phase. We shall primarily deal with the Distribution Phase in this article.

The Indian retiree faces some challenges while investing for the distribution phase

1. Generate post-tax income that is enough to cover expenses, regular and ad hoc, from guaranteed sources