As we exchanged cards and pleasantries before the start of our first financial-planning meeting, Rohit and Priya looked very keen to go ahead with the discussion on the goals that they were trying to save towards. As a standard operating procedure, they had already filled in the fact-finding form and had sent it in prior to the meeting, for me to go through and be prepared for the first meeting. While they had similar aspirations to other double-income couples their age — buying a larger home, annual foreign holidays and overseas education for their children — the one aspect of their financial plan that they did not want to plan for was their retirement. Since I found this rather strange, I decided to quiz them further.

“Rohit and Priya,” I asked, “considering that you are still 15-20 years away from retirement, I do not see any goal of saving towards retirement in your sheet. Don’t you believe it’s time to start saving towards retirement?”

“Of course it is. However, we have already got our retirement plan in place,” they replied in unison.

“That’s impressive,” I said.

Between the age of 35-40, most individuals we know are only in the process of starting to build their retirement corpus, after having provided for their primary residence. For salaried individuals, the provident fund is an automatic investment tool and helps partially towards taking care of their retirement needs. However, since both Rohit and Priya are first-generation professionals — Rohit is a cardiologist and Priya an interior designer — I was very keen to understand how they had achieved this. Most professional we know tend to start saving towards retirement as a last priority, after their other goals have been taken care of. While we always recommend to our clients that they should start saving for retirement as early as possible to get the benefit of compounding, since retirement always seems to be the farthest goal, it tends to come low down on the priority list.

... contd.