But V you are not saving enough for your retirement. If you don’t save enough, how will you invest that money? I asked.

His wife R said “how did you know we were not putting away enough for our retirement you have not yet seen our papers”.

I said “guess”. Any way there is not enough research in India. In the US about 95% of the millennial and GenX are likely to be woefully short for their retirement. Same will be true in India in just a matter of 20 years.

WE have outsourced senior citizen care to the family, and are busy destroying the family! Once it is complete the govt will wonder how to handle the “Senior citizen problem” or “Senior Citizen Timebomb”.

We will have to see what the US did in the 1980s to get into the mess in which it is today. It started the 401(k) plan. It expected people to save well (and invest well) in 40 years so that they will have enough for the next 40 years! Well they overestimated the American’s ability to save and the longevity risk was ignored. They also forgot that people might retire early – depending on the Social Security!

India could be headed there too. Soon. 2040 at best.

Let us look at YOUR problem:

1. Earning for 30 years and expecting that money to last for all your expenses and FOR expenses from 55 to 100 years is not only tough, but almost impossible. Go grapple with that.
2. Even assuming that you start early, invest well, don’t lose money, it is difficult to accumulate 40 times your annual expenses by the time you retire. Nothing to do with you, just that the investing environment is likely to get far more difficult.
3. The returns from the stock markets – say 1979 to 2019 is very unlikely to be repeated from 2019 to 2059. That means you need to invest EVEN MORE THAN what history tells you.
4. You choose a bad time to be born !! How well your portfolio performs is so much a matter of luck that you will not believe it. If you had retired in 1992..and put all your money in the market, remember in 1993, 45% of your portfolio would have been written down. Remember the market has been too nice to us since 2009. Be prepared for far more violence and standard deviation in the market!
5. You will live bloody long. Darn bloody long. If you are born after 1980 you will see a few people live up to 120 years for sure. If you are born after 2010 you are likely to be alive at your age of 115 for sure.
6. Nobody told me in 1982 that I would need AT LEAST ONE Million US $ if I wanted to retire. Well I would have laughed if I had heard it when I was 26, but at 62 I will be sure that it s right.

Just go and create a corpus of US 1 Million. You will need it. How will you do it? Omg…I have written a book on that. That book is for helping you on this tough journey.