If you switch on any YouTube video, or channel or even a blog by a financial service professional you get “Retirement advice”. Let us separate the wheat from the chaff.

1. To start planning for Retirement you need to know how much money one needs for Retirement: Absolutely foolish advice. Most people in their 50s are unable to estimate how much money they will need at the age of 65. How do you expect a 28-year-old to ‘Know’ or ‘calculate’ how much he/she needs for their retirement – which is from age 55 to age 95?
2. You have to plan for Inflation at 9% for retirement corpus calculation! Actually, this is a dynamic number and has to be tweaked every 2-3 years based on your own PERSONAL INFLATION CALCULATION, not by the number that Nirmala Mami tells us!
3. By the time you retire your Home EMI, children’s school fees, etc will disappear. Super duper stupid. These are not the killer expenses, and more importantly society charges, maintenance, etc. add up substantially to the living expenses. You cannot ignore this.
4. YOU must save for your Retirement – how amusing! Saving in national savings certificate, bank, endowment plans, WILL NOT BE SUFFICIENT.
5. The fall out of point no. 5 is that one needs to INVEST in EQUITY, real estate, etc – seeking a higher return so that a nice corpus is created.
6. When you are 60 years of age you should shift to safer assets like bank fixed deposits, nsc, post office deposits – you cannot risk being in equities.

Well there are more, but this is good for starters….