this book review was done by a 24 year old girl……I am happy that such a young person read the book. Here are her comments….

Retire Rich Invest Rs 40 a day!

Excited, you feel adrenaline rush down your blood… wait a minute – if you are in your 40s and think that 40 a day till you are 60 is going to solve your problems there after, you may not be right! But look at your grandparents and great grandparents – if they had lived through their 90s the probabilities of you touching that age is high. The money that you might have gathered by that exercise is going to be trivial enough for it to last for only a couple of years; if you are in your 20s and think about this as a boring subject or your age to be young enough to think about retirement – Subramanyam  is going to prove you wrong. The author has penned this book on retirement so beautifully that you could not only expect to be introduced to the titled concept but……
Some more concepts. There are many issues an individual faces while he is planning for his retirement. Hey women! he thinks you should invest more – and be prepared to handle money alone. Women work lesser years than men, take more breaks and live longer – and men should learn cooking – just in case they are alone!

I was surprised that I could read the book still in my first job, and was happy to finish reading it in 2 days time and doing the book review. However there were some important lessons to learn.
 
The question one needs to answer is not at what age should I retire but at what corpus level. The concept was nice. And calculating how long the money would last – meaning how long I could afford to be ‘retired’. In short was there a risk of finishing my corpus?

Often complicated problems demand human beings to search for answers or solutions that equally complex because simple – it just cannot be! By nature we are the most intelligent animals, aren’t we? The solution suggested is simple – uncomplicated for sure for the brain to process it;
• If you have a financial plan, include retirement; if not, make one – Starting early is the key
• Estimate the monthly expenditure you may incur after retirement – don’t forget medical expenses, nursing, old age home and inflation of course
• Learn more about your income and expenses at various stages in your life cycle (you will find an expense calculator in Chapter 3)
• Estimate your net worth (Find a net worth calculator in Chapter 4)
• Set SMART goals
• Open up your excel sheet and see how much you need to start investing from today itself to be able to achieve your goals – if you cannot do it alone, get help from an advisor
• Plan systematically and stick to it

Ok now! You might think where should I invest all the money? Will those assets yield the desired returns; we generally forget the compound interest formula because the power is not just in the returns the assets bring to your pockets but also the amount you invest and the time it stays invested.

So can 40 a day really work hard enough for you to retire rich? Of course says the author and it does great if you start early – stick to it and keep it simple. He has devoted a full chapter to this concept on which the whole book is placed!
Further down the chapters hel takes you through the family issues one faces while living through the retirement. There is also a note on retirement blunders to be avoided. He has written about a whole lot of instruments one can look at to fund retirement expenses ranging from debt securities to reverse mortgages – though one cannot go deeper into each one of them in a 220 page book, I’m sure you`d at least know what to search for in Google.  

So just wake your brains up, open your spreadsheet and start planning – and yes before that, pick this book to know what exactly you need to keep in mind. Your great grand children remember you or not, depends not only on whether you live long enough to play with them but also on what you leave back for them – both of which require money, so trust me you cannot say ‘money is not that important you know’ because the author is set to whip you with reality.

At the end of the book are some interesting tables –which tells you how much to save (making it a function of your current expenses), the millionaire calculator, delay calculator, etc. – I wish I knew where it could be found in the E form. It is quite a pain to enter the full worksheet in an excel sheet. The examples are easy to read and understand – especially the Jayshree Mathur story.