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It's never too late to start planning for retirement!

April 30, 2017 08:00 IST

V Viswanand, Senior Director and Chief Operations Officer, Max Life Insurance, lists out a few important steps to start planning for your golden years

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

A friend of mine came across a Facebook post depicting photographs of a Bollywood star of today and how she will look when she grows old.

A bit of search led him to an app which gave similar outcomes for him. While the app showed him what he would look like 20 years from now, he began to get inquisitive about his financial state at that time.

After a bit more of searching on the net, he found that he might be short by a few crores to lead a comfortable retired life!

This was indeed a wake-up call and prompted him to initiate retirement planning on a war footing. 

A research by Max Life Insurance–Nielsen indicated that this is the state of affairs for 60 per cent Indians as they start planning for retirement only after entering their 40s.

Those who are still in their 20s and 30s are lucky to be able to learn from this story. But those of you in their 40s must be going nuts to find a suitable solution.

Here are a few suggestions to plan for your golden years:

Create your retirement balance sheet

All that you have saved for your retirement will go into the asset side whereas the corpus you will need to live a comfortable post retirement life and incomplete liabilities like loans, expenses on children's higher education and marriage etc. will go into your liabilities side.

While creating this balance sheet, keep the following in mind:

Creating a viable retirement plan

Once you have your balance sheet ready, most of those in your 40s may find their balance sheet in red with post retirement liabilities exceeding their assets or assets not being sufficient to support long post retirement years.

Is dependence on children in those retired years the only solution? Certainly, not!

Here are a few options:

It is time to give retirement planning a serious consideration. While you might be curious about, 'how will I look when I am 60?' an equally important question to ask is, 'how will I feel when I am 60?'

Creating a retirement plan and taking the first few steps toward it will go a long way in ensuring a 'happy feeling' when you see your projected photograph at age 60!

V Viswanand