Planning your retirement while you’re in your 30s—Here’s all you need to know

Being in your early 30s can be quite overwhelming. While on one hand, your income significantly increases, on another hand, you have a plethora of responsibilities coming your way.

All you want to do is, make the right investments and take the much-needed steps to ensure a happy and secure future for yourself and your family. Your 30s is the ideal time that you should start planning your retirement.

So, if you are a 30 something right now and hasn’t started planning your retirement, then do it right away, to avoid risks of financial woes in the later years of your life. After all, failing to plan is planning to fail!

Planning your retirement

Make notes of your income and expenses and see how much you can religiously spare for retirement

This is the first and most important step in planning out your retirement. Make a list of your monthly expenses and see how much can you keep aside for your retirement. It is okay if you start small.

But do be disciplined and religiously save the decided amount every month without cheating, as per the budget you made. Once your income and affordability increase, increase your retirement savings too.

Choose what’s the best investment option for you

In your 30s, from the point of view of having maximum returns through long term investments, investing in Equity Mutual Funds is the most appropriate option for you.

The market risks would reduce, once you have been on board for a relatively long time. You can go ahead with Systematic Investment Plans, in which you can invest small amounts every month, but you need to be regular, and this would in return, reduce your market risks, and also give you the rupee cost averaging benefit.

In case, the market risk element here bugs you, you can go for fixed deposit schemes, but you should know that the returns on this investment will be very low.

Be a disciplined investor

Like mentioned before, it is okay to start small, but one thing you should follow religiously is being disciplined at investing. Don’t skip any month, and keep saving the amount you decided to save, every month without fail.

To make sure you do this, you can also lock your savings right at the beginning of the month, by setting standard instructions through net banking.

Earmark your retirement funds

It is important for every investor to earmark their retirement funds. The biggest mistake that they often make is withdrawing from their retirement funds whenever a financial emergency arises.

This can lead to a big dent in your financial portfolio, so come what may don’t withdraw from it!