Financial Planning after Retirement

A most commonly asked question is about generating income after retirement to be able to continue living the way you have been used to. In this article, Prof. Ruzbeh Bodhanwala and Prof. Shernaz Bodhanwala, faculty at School of Business, FLAME University, Pune, provide some valuable tips.

Senior citizens face several dilemmas regard-ing their investment decisions as many in this age group would not be earning active income from business, profession or job. We are asked several questions such as is my corpus enough for the remaining life, is investing in fixed deposit the only choice for me to generate regular income, how much liquid funds should I have to take care of emergency, should I withdraw money from Public Provident Fund (PPF) and invest them all in mutual funds, how much should I invest in equity, is it safe for me to put all my retirement corpus in government bonds as it is an extremely secure investment, and many more. In this article, we wish to provide some guidance on how effective financial planning can be done after retirement.

First and foremost, one needs to understand that investing is to allocate funds to different asset classes with an expectation of earning income and managing risk. At this stage of life where most of your family responsibilities like child education, marriage, home loan repayment, etc. Are taken care of, you may wish to spend money on travel with your spouse, foreign trips, gifting to children and grandchildren, eating out with friends, socialising, etc. Many people indulge in splurging more money than they should as they have lot of free time and sudden inflow of retirement funds like proceeds from pension, gratuity, provident fund, PPF, endowment insurance policies, etc.