TomorrowMakers

How I started preparing for retirement
Manisha Tomar
Doctor

Since I had been working only for two years, I never gave retirement any serious thought. My mother has been a housewife and father was working till last year. When he retired, he discussed his savings with me. That is when I realised that his retirement corpus was woefully inadequate. But he had several responsibilities and no one to guide him when he was younger about the importance of saving up for one’s retirement early.

He asked me to not make the same mistake and instead begin saving early for retirement. He also made me understand the effect of inflation on one’s savings and the importance of investing in equities for the long term.

This opened my eyes to the importance of saving up for retirement as early as possible. I also realised that our generation might not experience job security the way earlier generations experienced. We may have to even deal with layoffs or sabbaticals.

Therefore from August 2018, I started investing 15% of my investible surplus just to achieve my retirement goal. I hope to keep increasing my contribution by 10% year on year as my father also taught me how stepping up one’s investments can make the final corpus larger.