What’s the right age to start financial planning for retirement?

The best time to start planning and investing for your retirement is to start today whatever may be your current age and financial position in life. The sooner you start investing for a goal, the more time your money gets to compound itself. Suppose, you are 30-year-old today and start a monthly SIP of INR 2000 for next 30 years. Your money gets a long time to compound and grow. Assuming an annual interest rate of 12%, you can have a retirement corpus of 70 lakhs against an outlay 7.2 lakhs over 30 years.

If you started the same SIP a decade later, you will end up accumulating 20 lakhs for an outlay of 4.8 lakhs over 20 years. As you can see a delay of 10 years reduced your retirement corpus by one-third. Unfortunately, most people don’t realise the power of compounding over the long-term and end up missing the opportunity to create a bigger retirement corpus by starting out late. Delaying investments by a few years is a loss of time and hence the opportunity for the money to multiply.

Everyone should start planning for their financial goals and invest towards these goals as soon as they have settled in their first job. At the end, the steady long-term investor wins the race.

*Please note that these calculations are for illustrations only and do not represent actual returns. Mutual Funds do not have a fixed rate of return and it is not possible to predict the rate of return.