Is 1 Crore enough to retire on in India?

If you had Rs 1Cr (approx USD $200,000) would you be able to retire right now in India? If you need to meet retirement expenses over 30 years, would Rs 1Cr suffice?  How much can you spend monthly, if you need the Rs 1 Cr corpus last over 20 years.  To understand these and several related questions, read on.
Similar to the 1 million dollar mark (USD $1M) as a financial milestone in the US, in India in recent times, 1 Crore (Rs 1Crore) is the magic figure that is often talked about.  It is not as small as 1Lakh which is somewhat easily achievable these days, but not so far out that it is completely out of reach for the diligent and disciplined saver.  So lets say that through hard work, patience and discipline (or by winning the lottery) you have achieved the goal of having a total accumulated corpus (networth) of 1Crore.  By total corpus, I mean the total amount you have in liquid investable assets like bank accounts, Mutual fund investments, FDs, stocks, etc.  I do not want to include your primary residence as an asset, since you need it in your retirement days to live in.  Any additional real estate equity (if you are lucky enough to have it) can be included in the total corpus, as long as you realize that the entire corpus will need to be utilized to generate income once you have retired. 

Now the big question is Is 1Crore enough to retire on in India?  Can you use this corpus to fund all your expenses and never have to work again?  If you had 1Crore Rupees right now, could you give up your job right at this moment, and retire?  Now this is a very tough question to answer, since it depends on several factors that will be unique to your situation.  It is dependent on how many years you need to spend in retirement, do you have kids?, what are your monthly expenses?, do you plan to leave a inheritance for your kids, your health etc.  Since I cant tailor this article for all situations, I will instead assume a range of expenses, and compute the probability of a 1Crore corpus enabling retirement.

I will also assume for the purposes of this example that you can generate a 12% annual rate of return on your invested retirement corpus.  This should be the average rate of return across your asset allocation which could be in rental real estate, MFs, direct equity stock holdings and dividends, FDs, PPF etc

Another key factor we cannot ignore is inflation.  Many times people forget to factor in this destroyer of wealth.  I will go with an 8% inflation rate, since these days we are subject to rampant inflation, and I think it will take several years if not decades for the inflation rate to cool off. 

With these basic assumptions let us first start with a simple example wherein you have accumulated Rs 1 Crore, and are now ready to retire.  You estimate that your annual expenses will be Rs 6Lakh (Rs 50,000 per month)  Can you fund your entire retirement expenses from your retirement corpus?  Let's do the math and see how this works out.  I have plotted the total corpus and the increasing annual expenses (since we have a 8% inflation rate) in the graph below, with the total corpus on the left axis and the annual expenses on the right axis. 

Notice that in the early years your corpus keeps increasing since you are getting 12% investment returns, while you are not withdrawing much for your annual expenses.  Your total corpus peaks in your 16th year of retirement at Rs1.6Cr !! Unfortunately for you, your annual expenses are also growing at the rapid 8% inflation rate.  So in your 16th year of retirement you will need Rs19 Lakh to fund the same lifestyle which you could afford in your 1st retirement year at only Rs6 Lakh.  Your annual expenses now keep increasing and make a significant dent in your total retirement corpus.  From the 16th year onwards your corpus steadily decreases and finally runs out completely in the 26th year.  So basically for this situation, you can fund a retirement of only 26 years.  If you are in your 60s, then potentially 26 years should be sufficient to cover the remainder of your (and your spouses) life needs.  Mind you, that you will not have any corpus left at the end of 26 years to pass on as an inheritance to your heirs.  However if you are in your 50s, you could be cutting it close since in 26 years you will be in your mid 70s, which would be a terrible time to run out of money!

Finally, continuing to assume a 12% investment return rate, I show below how long your retirement corpus will last for different inflation rate assumptions and annual expenses.  I start with Rs3 Lakh annual expenses (or Rs 25,000 monthly expenses) and keep increasing the annual expenses to as much as Rs 7 Lakhs (or Rs 75,000 in monthly expenses)  For each of these cases, the height of the bar, shows how many years you can assume the Rs 1Cr corpus will last. 

The blue bars assume an inflation rate of 8% and the red and green bars assume 9% and 10% inflation rate respectively.  Naturally as the inflation rate goes up, your total corpus runs out faster.  This table will help you pick an inflation rate you are comfortable with, and assess if you can retire with the Rs 1Cr corpus.  For example if you are in your 50s and want to be conservative in your inflation rate prediction and go with 9%, then you should target monthly expenses of Rs 25,000 or lower (Rs 4 Lakh annual expenses) to ensure that your corpus will last for atleast 30 years (which is what you will need, to ensure you have money well into your 80s)

I hope this table will help you figure out if Rs 1Cr will be enough to fund your retirement dreams.  You would be surprised at how little Rs 1Cr can fund in monthly expenses if the inflation rate continues to remain very high!

Compound Interest 101

Compound interest is the single most interesting and critical factor that impacts all projections of investment growth, retirement corpus accumulation, loan EMIs and payback tenures, etc.  For a concept that is so fundamental to financial theory, compounding can be exceedingly difficult for the average person to understand and fully appreciate.  This is fundamentally because with compound interest, the total corpus grows or declines in an exponential manner.  It is widely believed that the human mind has difficulty comprehending exponential behavior.  For example, Albert Bartlett a US scholar, once commented that "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function".  In economics the exponential growth model is also known as the Malthusian growth model, after the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who authored "An Essay on the Principle of Population", one of the earliest books on population growth rates.

Let us look at a few examples to better understand the power of compounding and its implications to financial planning.  We will start with a simple goal of saving up Rs30 Lakhs in 25 years.  This could be a financial goal that you take up to fund your retirement, or maybe plan for your child's higher education.  Assuming a 12% annual rate of return, you would need to invest Rs20090 annually to achieve this goal.  So far this is just basic mathematics, and is the kind of computation any financial planner, or online financial calculator can do for you.  Here is a pictorial representation of how the corpus would grow over the 25 years, finally reaching a value of Rs30 Lakhs at the end of the 25th year.

Now here are some interesting observations that are a direct result of the nature of compounding.  I have labeled them as Compound Interest Observations (or CIOs)

CIO1: The first thing I'd like you to notice is how exactly your total corpus grows over time.  The exponential nature of the curve above leads to some interesting results in terms of the rate of growth of your corpus over time.  This result may not be very evident when you look at the above curve, so let me show you the same curve in percentage terms below. 

First lets focus on the red line at the mid-point of your 25 year investment plan.  At the 12.5 year mark, your corpus only amounts to 20% of your final savings goal!  So even though you have completed 50% of your investment timeline, you have only achieved 20% of your investment goal!  Next lets focus on the second red line at the 20 year mark.  At the 20 year mark you have completed four-fifths or 80% of your investment timeline, and still your corpus has only reached a little over 50% of your savings target.  It is only in the last 5 years that the power of compounding really kicks in and catapults your investment to the final 100% target.  The key takeaway here is that even though you are steadily investing Rs20000 annually, and the rate of return is also a steady 12% annually, the corpus growth is heavily weighted to the later portion of your savings timeline.  In the early years a very small amount of the corpus will be built up, while towards the end as you near your goal, the corpus grows rapidly.  This simple effect has profound implications on the impact of variations in investment ability, or investment return on the final corpus accumulated.  As a case-study, this example clearly reveals why many people get frustrated with their savings progress.  In the early stages of savings, the corpus growth is much slower (20% corpus in 50% time, 50% corpus in 80% time) and it is only much later that you can finally start seeing the magic effect of compounding.  This effect many times leads to people giving up on their savings goals, since they are not able to see a proportionate increase in their corpus for the effort they put in (in the form of annual investments) during the early years.  However, this example clearly shows that you need the patience to complete your investment timeline, to truly reap the rewards of compounding.

CIO2: The next point to closely observe is the yearly increase in your corpus.  I have plotted the yearly increments in the total corpus for this example below. 

Notice that in the first few years the annual increase is only around Rs20,000 to Rs40,000 per year.  Whereas after the 15th year, the corpus grows by more than Rs1 Lakh per annum.  This just reinforces the observation from the previous case wherein the rate of growth is hardly worth mentioning in the initial years, but the yearly increase is spectacular in the last few years of your investment timeline.

CIO3: Next lets look at how the yearly growth that is described above, is actually achieved.  In the plot below, I show 2 lines.  The blue line is the percentage contribution of your own investment to the yearly increase above (remember you are putting in Rs20K every year which will show up as an increase in corpus every year, but is really your own money) and the red line is the percentage contribution from the investment returns (at 12% per annum) to the yearly increase.

Observe that in the first 3 years, over 70% of the yearly increase is coming from your own investment adding up to the corpus.  The increase from investment returns is less than 30% in each of the first 3 years.  This is why it is so critical to continue with your investment plans in long range products like ULIPs and insurance endowment policies well beyond 3years, since in the first 3 years, most of the "growth" is really your own money being returned to you.  The cross-over occurs at the 6th year in this example, where both your investment of Rs20K and the investment returns are almost the same.  Beyond this point, the investment returns steadily keep increasing and from the 20th year onwards, account for more than 90% of the yearly growth.  At this time, your yearly investment of Rs20K becomes negligible since almost all of the yearly growth is powered by investment returns.

CIO4: The final observation I will make in this article is to drive home the point from CIO3.  The graph below shows the percentage of your money (the annual Rs20K that you are investing) in the actual corpus that is available every year.

You will notice again that in the initial few years the percentage of your money in the total corpus is high.  For example at the end of the 3rd year, ~80% of the total available corpus is your own money! (the Rs60K that you have invested in the first 3 years) Investment returns at the end of the 3rd year form only 20% of the overall corpus.  Even after 10 long years, the total corpus comprises only 50% of investment returns with the remaining 50% being your own investment money.  This again highlights the need to stay invested in long range products almost to the end of their lifetime, since during the early stages most of the corpus is your own money, with a low percentage of investment return based money. 

I hope this article sheds some additional light on how compounding actually works, and allows you to better envision some of the implications of the way compounding grows your investments.  No wonder Albert Einstein said "Compound Interest is the 8th wonder of the world.  He who understands it ... earns it ... He who doesn't ... pays it"

Generational Finance NOT Personal Finance

Just do a google search for Personal Finance, and you will see tons of websites, blogs, articles, marketing pitches etc, all doling out advice on personal finance and how to go about achieving the various goals, investment decisions, savings rates etc associated with it.  It is amazing how much information and guidance gets dished out and consumed relating to this topic.  I guess, Personal Finance gets down to the core of who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and touches every aspect of our lives, which is why it is so hotly discussed, debated, talked about, and basically flogged to death on every financial TV channel, news media, or personal finance blog that you come across.

Now typically, when it comes to the savings and investments part of personal finance, every single financial planner and wealth management guru seems to approach it in the same structured manner.  The first step is to collect data about the person (or nuclear family) in terms of his/her current financial situation.  This could be in the form of  assets, liabilities, income sources, expenses, investments, insurance, etc.  The next step is to document all the financial goals, and try to assign a timeline and a Rupee (or Dollar) amount to it.  Then, typically the financial Yoda (Star Wars reference) will pull out a bunch of assumptions based on historical data and future projections, regarding risk and returns for different asset classes, and suggest a quantum of money for savings/investments and the asset class mix, to attain each separate financial goal.  This overall summary is called the Personal Finance Plan, that is handed out to the client with a hefty charge for the service.  I have seen this pattern repeated over and over ad nauseam, with only minor variations in the overall storyline. 

Pictorially you could think of a Personal Finance Life Cycle to look like this. 

The actual age at which you target these goals, or even the goals themselves may vary from person to person, but the concept is basically the same.  For each financial goal, the planner will suggest a quantum of investment and an asset strategy that starts with an aggressive allocation plan, and then subsequently moves to safer and lower risk allocations as the goal gets nearer and nearer.  This is the time honored method of PERSONAL financial planning.

I propose that this method has become dated and a new thought process is required to redefine financial planning.  The key change in thinking is to plan in terms of GENERATIONAL finance, and not PERSONAL finance.  Lets do a thought experiment for a minute wherein the same financial planner as before, is providing financial advice to the person above, and at the same time also to his father and son.  To explain simply, lets assume that the planner is providing financial guidance to 3 generations of the family across their entire lifetimes, all in a synchronized manner, rather than looking at each persons financial plan in isolation.  In this new scenario the planner will observe that major financial goals will typically come up in every 5year cycle (either for the grandfather, father or son; forgive the patriarchal assumption here, but I need to work with something and a matriarchal lineage would work just as well for this thought experiment) Basically every 5year cycle or thereabouts, major financial goals will mature, need to be funded and retired.  So I hypothesize that a simple asset allocation of 90% aggressive investments (high return, high risk; be it equity, real estate, or whatever if the flavor of the day) and 10% safe investments (low return, low risk; be it CDs, FDs, debt or whatever works at that time) should be sufficient for the GENERATIONAL planner to meet all the Generational goals.  At any point in time, there will be 1 goal that will be nearing maturity, and which will need funding, and all other goals will be at a longer timeline. 

Fundamentally, I do not believe this is a new concept at all.  In India, all large corporations (except the more recent ones) have been built up over generations and are tightly owned by a single family (Tata's, Birla's, Ambani's, Wipro, Mallya's, etc).  This is also true, maybe to a smaller extent in the US (Walton's, Hilton's etc) Typically multiple generations of the family are involved in building up and maintaining the scale and size of the corporation and in turn the family wealth.  Even in historical times, kingdoms were ruled by dynasties that held power for multiple generations (Mughals, Guptas, Mauryas, Peshwas etc).  For that matter even today the Indian political system is dominated by one family, and I could argue the same for the US a few decades earlier (the Kennedy's)  Taking a holistic view of generational wealth building, can help you develop plans that are better suited and optimized to help you meet all your generational goals and not just your personal financial goals.  Also the longer timelines associated with generational wealth building, can significantly increase the power of compounding, and mitigate the probability of high risk asset strategies failing on you. 

And the amazing part is that there are live running examples of this concept that you can look at right now!  Trusts are fundamentally formal structures that enable generational wealth management.  Trusts are able to look at long term trends and benefit from a longer timeline that allows them to make the right investment calls.  For example the Harvard Management Company (HMC) maintains and manages the Harvard University Endowment Trust.  The trust forms the backbone of the university funding, and all new grants and withdrawals are managed around the core endowment fund.  You can think of your generational wealth also in similar terms, with core assets that keep growing form generation to generation, and your own personal income and withdrawal needs to be managed around the generational core.  In fact in India we have the concept of HUF (Hindu Undivided Family) which is a legal financial entity, that can own and invest in assets, is a taxable entity and can be managed separately from your own personal financial entity, even while you are a partner in the HUF. 

So in summary, I posit that taking a holistic view at Generational Finance is the secret of all the large wealth (or power) building efforts that you see in history, which take advantage of the compounding effects of decade and even centuries in generations rather than just years within a single generation.  I also propose that there are already legal avenues like Trusts and HUFs where you can see this in action today.  All you need is a paradigm shift in thinking from Personal Finance to Generational Finance, to open up new methods and avenues of investment thoughts and actions. 

Let me know if you agree with my thought process on this.

ET Wealth : Family Finances : Oct31-Nov6 2011

The ET Wealth Online personal finance weekly magazine has a Family Finances section that features one family every week for personal finance advice.  This week they featured a family with a monthly income of Rs 54000 (approx USD $1100)  The article is titled Low income likely to pose a big hurdle.  The first thing that struck me is the financial planner characterizing Rs54K per month as low income.  For an emerging economy like India wherein the average monthly income is in the Rs3000-5000 per month (~USD $100), it is a little strange to consider RS54K per month to be low income.  Probably the planner was taking into the account the financial goals of the family while pronouncing their income as low.

The cash flow situation did not look very healthy given the 54% expenditure (Rs11K + Rs18K) on rent + home loan EMI.  Going in for a ready to move in flat, would probably have been the better choice here, even if the cost of the flat would have been a little higher, to avoid having to pay both the rent and the home loan EMI concurrently.  Typically banks do not sanction home loans if the EMI is more than 45% of the net take home monthly income.  In this case, I characterize rent + home loan EMI as the total outgo towards house acquiring expenses and thus they violate the 45% rule (54% > 45%)

Finally they list 4 goals viz (1) Daughter's education (2) Daughter's marriage (3) Retirement (4) World Tour.  The planner is right in striking off the World Tour goal as unachievable giving the current cash flow and savings/investment situation.  Surprisingly he lists the retirement objective as the partially achievable goal with a lowered retirement corpus requirement ("Rs2 crore should be sufficient to see them through their post retirement years") based on some computations that he does not share.

I would have ordered the goals as follows (1) Retirement (2) Daughter's education (3) Daughter's marriage (4) World Tour.  In an income constrained environment, retirement should be the number one objective for any couple.  Their daughter can avail of an education loan when the time is right, and a personal loan if necessary to fund marriage expenses.  However, there is no concept of a "retirement loan" that anyone can avail of, when this critical need arises. 

In my opinion, a good financial planner/advisor should not only focus on crunching the numbers based on inputs from the client, but also help the client prioritize their goals based on a logical understanding of the way finances work, and not just based out of an emotional need to take on well-meaning but extravagant financial goals.  Though the usual advise regarding asset allocation, life insurance, health insurance, inflation based number crunching etc is all covered, I find the critical goal guidance missing. 

Of course this is just my novice opinion!  Let me know what you think.

Household Savings Rate : How do we measure up?

It is the last day of the month, and our only sources of monthly income, i.e. our paychecks hit our salary accounts today.  I had talked earlier about shooting for a 85% savings rate, and the need to be able to track this religiously, if we want to have any chance of hitting this super aggressive goal.  We have always struggled to come up with a system to track our expenses.  Either we get too ambitious and try to record every single penny we spend, and end up failing miserably in the attempt, or we become too lazy and forget to track any spending at all.  So we figured the first step was to come up with a simple way to monitor our overall monthly expenses and then refine the method if we see the need for it.  So instead of messing with tracking spreadsheets, notebooks, etc, my wife and I came up with this pretty simple method, that was staring us in the face.  Today, I simply added up my wife's and my monthly October paycheck, and I withdrew 10% of the amount in cash from our nearby ATM. 

We now have the entire month of November to eke out, using just the cash we have in hand.  We purposely chose to limit the cash withdrawal to 10%, so that we have a 5% buffer in case we needed the extra expenditure to finish up the month.  We intend to cover all our monthly expenses by drawing down from this kitty and paying in cash for all our spending.  There are a few expenses that are paid in auto-pilot mode through online websites such as utilities and phone-bills.  We will simply draw out an equivalent amount of cash from our 10% stock and keep it aside to ensure that we stay true to our target spending allocation. 

To summarize, we will only spend the "real world" money that I withdrew from the ATM in hard cash (which is 10% of our joint monthly income) and will leave all of the remaining online wealth (in bank accounts, SIPs, home loan EMIs, insurance payments, etc) to remain as investments. 

I suggest this method to you as well, as it should be pretty simple, and reduces the burden of thinking about it.  The one thing that will not be covered by this method, is tracking where our expenses are actually going into (for example how much are we spending on food, utilities, entertainment, health care, school fees etc) However, for starters if we can stick to the 15% spending target, I don't think there will be much need to figure out where we spent it.  It is only if we are consistently over-spending beyond the 15% target, will we need to spending distribution, so we can figure out where to cut back.  But then, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.  For now, on towards a frugal November!

India Early Retirement Safe Withdrawal Rate

In an earlier post, I had touched upon the concept of Safe Withdrawal Rates, and lamented the fact that most Indian financial planners and retirement gurus seem completely oblivious to the whole concept.  Simply put, a safe withdrawal rate is the percentage of your final retirement corpus that you can safely use for annual expenses, without running out of money over the lifetime of your retirement.  It is critical to be able to predict this as accurately as possible to help you with your retirement planning.  For example, if you have accumulated a retirement corpus of Rs50 lakh (about USD $100,000 at today's weakened Rupee to Dollar conversion rate), and want to use it to fund over 20years of retirement expenses for yourself and spouse (assume you are retiring in your 60s, and based on your family history, expect to live into the 80s), you will need to know how much money you can pull out in the first year of retirement to fund your living expenses.  Would you be ok with pulling out Rs2 lakh in the first year, or can you take out as much as Rs5lakh?  How about in the next year? How do you make these plans in a systematic manner?  This is what SWR is all about.

There is a lot of research and literature regarding SWRs in developed economies like the US, where there is tons of historical data regarding asset class performance over long periods of time (basically the historical rate of return from stocks, real estate, bonds, treasuries etc) that can be used along with historical macro-economic data like inflation, GDP growth etc to reasonably predict a useable SWR into the future.  However in an emerging economy like India, a lot of these key inputs are either not reliably available, or changing so fast, that it becomes very difficult to predict SWR in the Indian context. 

I had come across this article titled Safe Withdrawal Rates from Retirement Savings for Residents of Emerging Market Countries written by Dr. Wade Pfau, who is an Economics professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo.  So I specifically put forward 2 questions to him.  What was his opinion for a Safe Withdrawal rate that I could use in India? and (2) How should I adjust the SWR if I was planning on an extended retirement period spanning 60 years. 

Wade was kind enough to put together a detailed response on his blog titled Do-it-Yourself Safe Withdrawal Rates to my queries.  The summary is that predicting SWRs in an emerging economy like India is very difficult given the lack of historical data, and the rapidly changing emerging market dynamics.  His feedback is that for new retirees, it is the future asset returns that matter, and the ability to predict these returns is the key to being able to predict how much to withdraw from your retirement corpus per year.  For an extended retirement period he suggests reducing the withdrawal rate by 0.5-1% to increase the probability of success (i.e. your money out-living you)

I appreciate the thought he has put into the matter, and the various links he has provided with additional data and analysis on the subject.  My goal will be to review the material he has provided, and use it to estimate an SWR that I can use for my own retirement planning.

India Early Retirement and Formula F1 Racing

Formula F1 Racing debuts in India for the very first time today, at the 875 acre Buddh International Circuit.  The high octane world of car racing is as alien to me as bob-sledding is to Jamaicans (obscure reference to the movie Cool Runnings)  It takes some patience and extreme passion to enjoy watching several futuristic looking cars, that all look pretty much the same to me, hurtling around an odd shaped track of 5.14Km (about 2.34Miles) over 60 times.  The fastest drivers can complete one circuit in as little as 1.5mins, setting an average speed of over 200Kmph.  Still there is a lot of interest in this fast growing sport in India, and we expect the popularity of car racing to grow exponentially in coming years.

So why are we talking about Formula F1 Racing on a early retirement blog? Well that's because I believe there is an enormous similarity between  F1 racing and Early Retirement, that is just too glaring to ignore.  Stumped? Well you wont be, once you have read through the remainder of this article. 

Even though F1 racing has this reputation of being an exotic sport, which attracts the attention of only a very small percentage of sports fans, there is one critical function that it performs in the world of automobiles.  Formula F1 Racing is relentlessly pushing the envelope on what is possible in the world of automobiles and transportation.  Both technology and human endurance are pushed to the limits in this sport.  But the naive reader may ask, What does that have to do with me? The answer is simple, and it has everything to do with you as long as you own a car, or use any form of automobile based transport.  Formula F1 has been for years pioneering cutting edge advancements in technology that eventually filter their way down into stock road cars that you and I can buy out of a showroom or dealership.  Advancements in engine technology (horsepower, lighter engine blocks, turbo, internal engine coatings etc), brakes (Anti-lock Brake Systems or ABS, disc brakes, carbon composite brakes etc) fuel injection systems, car body and chassis (streamlined carbon fibres, exotic composites, safety glass etc) and virtually every component of car design, have been pioneered on F1 cars, before making their way into productized road cars.  This has helped improve the safety, reliability, comfort, and cost of the road worthy car models that you and I can buy off the dealership.  This is one of the key reasons that several car manufacturers and car component manufacturers, own or sponsor F1 racing teams, since it gives them an excellent platform to showcase their latest technology and also test it under extreme conditions before implementing it on the thousands of cars that they manufacture and sell. 

Now here comes the punchline:  I propose that early retirement enthusiasts, such as yours truly, are the F1 cars of the retirement and personal finance industry.  We are the ones that come up with the exotic plans, asset allocation strategies, frugal living methods, safe withdrawal rate computations, risk-reward analyses, long range retirement planning, innovative use of financial products, early adopters of new products, market influencers to develop new products, you name it, that relentlessly pushes the envelope on personal finance and retirement planning.  As the myriad of wealth management firms, banks, insurance companies, Asset management organizations, Financial Planners, etc continue to come up with advancements, methods and strategies, we are the ones who are most likely testing them out in the real world, in our extreme early retirement scenarios, to make sure that they are "road-worthy" for the average traditional personal finance and retirement aspirant.  The purpose of this blog is to share the results of this "F1 road testing" of my personal retirement plan with you, so you can incorporate pre-tested, sure-shot, aspects that are relevant to you, in your financial planning.

By the way it looks like Sebastian Vettel of team RedBull is the winner of the inaugural Indian F1 Grand Prix.  I hope to emulate him in the world of personal finance and retirement.