70-80 years …that’s what most of the investors answer when they are asked – “How long are you going to live?” –“ for how many Years of retirement shall I plan for?” Truly speaking, no one knows how long you will live! We may die at 60, 70,80, and 90,100 or maybe 47 or next week! Who knows? More specifically, when we plan for having enough money in resources that will last post or retirement, when we will have no income but obviously most of the expenses we would have currently (and yes don’t forget to add inflation !!) Are we doing our homework with a lot of thought and proper arithmetic? So, let’s now look at some data – Your answer to “How long will you live after retirement?” will also vary depending on how happy you are with life overall currently. If you are stuck in your job, where you feel frustrated and also have not been able to reach some milestones in life, your answer will show the pessimism and you might say “75 years is enough for me” However, if you are full of life, very happy right now, in a great health and have been doing great in your financial life, you might say “I would love to live till 90 or 95, Life is so beautiful” But Most investors get it wrong Coming to the main question we are trying to answer today, we want to investigate or rather get enough clues on how long we can expect to live in retirement. Finding a good enough answer is critical for every one of us, because then we can design our life, priorities and investment plan for retirement based on the answer we get today. I want to convince you today, that if you feel that you will just live till 75-80 yrs. only, then maybe you need to change the way you look at it. Maybe your planning is wrong. Maybe you are taking the best case. The biggest retirement worries most of the people (who are already retired) is “Outliving their money”. Just think of a situation where a person has planned for just 20 yrs. of retirement (retired at 60 and expects to die at 80), but he has already reached 78 yrs. of age and his money is almost finished. What kind of mental trauma he/she has to go through? We all want to make sure that it does not happen to us. We all want to make sure that in our retirement life, we have enough money, freedom to withdraw enough money for our expenses and have a decent margin in case anything goes wrong, so that you don’t have to depend too much financially on others. So here are the eye openers you need to consider: Share of Senior citizens will increase in the coming years – We have a high percentage of the young population in our country at the moment. Obviously, this will change as we move forward and this high share of the young population will take the senior citizen to youngsters’ graph more on the senior sized matrix. This will in turn drive more focus on senior citizen space and all-round development for increasing the life expectancy further. 2. Increasing life expectancy in a developing India – Currently, data says that average life expectancy stands at 69.66 years. One point to understand here is that this is an average, which takes into account early death due to malnutrition, diseases (where people are not afford treatment or have ignorance towards vaccinations available), all people who die of suicide, etc. Thus, it is safe to believe that the actual figure for people reading this is quite higher than 70…also our modern India is developing at a pace wherein the life expectancy will only go up!! 3. Women live longer than men – In an average household a wife survives for more than 4 years more than her male counterpart, data suggests. So, when we plan for the retirement of a couple these points will make a huge difference to the overall years, we need to plan for… 4. Share of Senior citizens will increase in the coming years – We have a high percentage of the young population in our country at the moment. Obviously, this will change as we move forward and this high share of the young population will take the senior citizen to youngsters’ graph more on the senior sized matrix. This will in turn drive more focus on senior citizen space and all-round development for increasing the life expectancy further. So, what’s the inference…can we take the risk of considering the average number of years to plan for retirement or look to get the facts right? We have now started to plan for our client nothing less than 85 + years or 90 and even at 95 years as the age until we plan for their expenses post retirement. None of us folks would want to be on the wrong side of our finances at an age where we might be able to do much but regret not planning better in our sunny days of making and saving optimally for one of our most important financial goals in life… Post navigation 11 Tips For Better Financial Decision-Making 5 Key Investment Strategies For Long-Term Growth
