Retirement and drawdown
18 articles
How to Build a Retirement Portfolio Before and After Retirement
Retirement day is not the moment a portfolio becomes safe. It is the middle of a transition that should start years earlier and continue for years afterwards, and the abrupt version is a mistake in both directions at once.
5 min read
What to Do If You Cannot Save Enough for Retirement
When the required saving is larger than the available money, the answer is not a better investment. It is deciding which of the other four variables moves — and doing that deliberately rather than by default.
5 min read
How Career Breaks and Pay Gaps Affect Retirement Income
A break from paid work costs more than the salary forgone, and the extra costs are invisible because nobody sends a bill for them. Making them visible is what allows a household to share them fairly instead of leaving them where they happen to land.
6 min read
Why Children Should Not Be Your Retirement Plan
The arrangement where children support their parents in old age worked when families were large, lived together and lived shorter lives. Every one of those conditions has changed, and the plan that rests on them has quietly stopped being a plan.
6 min read
The Cost of Postponing Retirement Contributions
Waiting a few years to start does not cost a few years of contributions. It costs those contributions and every year of growth they would have had, and the arithmetic of catching up later is much less forgiving than it looks from the front.
6 min read
Why Early Retirement Needs More Than a Bigger Multiple
Stopping work a decade early is usually planned by scaling up a number. It changes the problem in four ways at once, and only one of them is a matter of scale — the others get worse faster than the corpus gets bigger.
6 min read
How a Reverse Mortgage Can Turn Home Equity into Retirement Income
A reverse mortgage converts the value of a home you keep living in into an income. It is the answer to a real and common problem, and it is a loan rather than a sale — which is where most of the misunderstandings start.
5 min read
How Systematic Withdrawal Plans Work — and What They Do Not Guarantee
The money arrives on the same date every month, in the same amount, exactly like a salary. It is not a salary, and the resemblance is the most dangerous thing about it.
6 min read
How to Account for Real Estate in a Retirement Plan
A property's market value cannot buy groceries. It contributes to a retirement only through a specific route — rent, a sale, a smaller home, or simply not paying rent — and each route has to be spelled out before the value counts for anything.
5 min read
What a Retirement Bucket Strategy Can and Cannot Do
Dividing a corpus into near, medium and long-term pots is a genuinely useful way to organise retirement money. What it mostly does is make an allocation easier to hold — which is worth a great deal, and is not the same as making it safer.
5 min read
How a Retirement Corpus Is Calculated
The popular answer is a multiple of annual expenses. The real calculation is a schedule of future spending, less whatever income arrives anyway, brought back to what it is worth on the day you stop working — and it produces a range rather than a target.
6 min read
How Pension, Annuity and Portfolio Withdrawals Form a Retirement Income Floor
Splitting retirement income into the part that must arrive and the part that can vary changes both what you invest in and how a bad market feels. It is a design decision rather than a product choice.
5 min read
Why Inflation and Longevity Dominate Retirement Estimates
Retirement plans are usually stressed by changing the assumed return. The two things that actually decide the answer are how fast prices rise and how long the money has to last, and neither is usually varied at all.
7 min read
The Limits of a Safe Withdrawal Rate
There is a number everybody quotes for how much a retiree can safely take from a portfolio each year. It comes from a different country's market and a much longer record, and the Indian data cannot produce its own version. This page shows exactly how far short it falls.
8 min read
Semi-Retirement or Full Retirement: What Changes Financially?
Continuing to earn something changes the arithmetic of retirement more than most people expect, because it works on three variables at once. Whether it is the right choice is a different question from whether it helps.
4 min read
Why the Order of Returns Matters Once You Start Withdrawing
Take the same years of market returns and shuffle them. If nobody touches the money, every order ends at the identical value. Start withdrawing, and one order leaves you with nothing while another leaves you richer than you began.
8 min read
How to Stress-Test a Retirement Plan
Most stress tests change the return assumption until the answer becomes uncomfortable, then change it back. A useful one asks a different question: what breaks this plan, when would we notice, and what would we do about it.
5 min read
How to Structure a Portfolio You Are Living Off
A portfolio that is being spent is not the same object as a portfolio that is being built, even when it holds identical things. What changes is not the assets but what the money is being asked to do.
6 min read