Aegon Stark

📸 𝗣𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 😍🏔️

Rocky Bhai is fictional but Thalapathy Vijay is real.

If the 40 crore retirement number I shared shocked you, this post is for you. Here is what I said. If you are 40 today, spending 2 lakh rupees a month, with no EMIs to service, and you want to retire at 60, you will need 40 crore rupees. The comments had a lot of pushback. The number feels impossible. It is not. Let me show you why. Two assumptions drive this number. Inflation and life expectancy. Both are higher than what regular retirement calculators assume. Both are right. Start with inflation. Retail CPI in India is 5 to 6%. That is the inflation of atta, dal, and bus fare. It is not the inflation of an affluent household. Private healthcare in India runs at 12 to 14% every year. Domestic staff wages in metros are growing at 10 to 12%. Premium school fees, international travel, club memberships. All of these inflate between 8 and 10%. Blend them and you get 9%. That is the real inflation rate of an HNI lifestyle. Now life expectancy. Most Indians plan their retirement assuming they will live to 75 or 80. That is what national averages suggest. But national averages are pulled down by infant mortality and rural data. They have nothing to do with how long a healthy, affluent Indian actually lives. For a couple aged 65 today, there is a 71% probability that one partner reaches 85. A 44% probability that one reaches 90. Now the math. 2 lakh rupees a month at 9% inflation becomes 11 lakh 20 thousand rupees a month at age 60. That is an annual spend of 1.34 crore. Plan for 30 years of retirement. Your retirement portfolio which is focused on capital preservation (60% fixed income: 40% equity) earns 9%. Your Inflation is also 9%. Your real return is zero. So corpus needed equals 30 multiplied by 1.34 crore. That is 40 crore. Here is the good news. This number is not as far away as it looks. At 12% returns before retirement, 40 crore at age 60 translates to roughly 4 crore today for a 40 year old. The point of this message is not to scare you. It is to make sure you understand the silent erosion of purchasing power that inflation causes.

Most people quit because they forget that you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. It's so obvious. You suck. Of course you're not going to win in 2 weeks. But if you can learn to enjoy extended periods of failure, you will make it very, very far in life.

Bengaluru, brace yourself for rainfall. Intense thunderstorms are possible in the next 36-48 hours.