How to plan your second innings

With Amitabh Bachchan's birthday a few days back, all the TV channels started telecasting his movies, and while switching channels I came across his movie Baghban. The movie, in addition to the acting from the lead pair, also struck me as one of the few movies to tackle the issue of financial planning, or rather the pitfalls from the lack of it.

While not all children are like the ones in Baghban, there are numerous people who spend their entire professional life in financially securing the lives of their loved ones. And, more often, while performing this task, people tend to miss out on planning the finances for the later stage of their own lives, which at times, disrupts the healthy balance, forcing them to compromise their lifestyle drastically, against their will.

However, with judicious financial planning, the second innings can be fun sans any financial distress.

Here are a few things that one needs to consider:

Scan financial state

Whether you have retired or you are nearing retirement, it is important for you to know the source of income that will cover your monthly expenditure post retirement. It could be pension, retirement corpus or income from investments like fixed deposits or real estate, etc. Also, you need to check if the retirement income will be enough to cover your monthly and medical expenditure.

In case, if you are in a rented apartment then the monthly expenditure should include the rent as well.

Get a health cover

With the sky-rocketing medical costs it is always advisable for the elderly to get a health insurance cover of their own as opposed to solely depending on the health schemes issued by the employer. Most of the employee-funded health covers are not sufficient as they do not include many age-related ailments. If you buy a health policy you get the option of selecting a policy which is mainly designed for the senior citizens.

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