When is the best time to start planning for your retirement?

Ideally it should start from the time you start earning, but let’s get practical here. When you start earning for the first time, you take some time to adjust and learn how to live on your own, buy things from your money and setup your new life. Hence, let’s give 6 months for all this settlement.

After this 6-month period, you should start planning for retirement. This planning doesn’t need to be very complicated. All you need to do is put aside a small portion of your salary (let’s say 10–20%) every month and invest it in your preferred instrument (my suggestion — equity). You need to promise yourself that you are not going to touch this investment for the next 35 or so (basically till your retirement age) and that’s it. You are sorted now.

Having said that, let’s say you didn’t start retirement planning at the time you started earning (e.g. when you were 25). If you are 35 now, you can still start. You have 25years to go (assuming retirement age 60). 25years duration is quite decent for equities to create wonder through compounding and generate a reasonable corpus for your investment.

Hope this helps you start your retirement planning now!