What is Retirement Planning?

Retirement planning means preparing today for your future life so that you continue to meet all your goals and dreams independently. This includes setting your retirement goals, identifying income sources, sizing up expenses, investing to grow your retirement savings and managing assets as well as risks. It involves determining retirement income goals and what's needed to achieve those goals. Future cash flows are estimated to gauge whether the retirement income goal is possible.

You can start at any time, but it works best if you factor it into your financial planning as early as possible. That's the best way to ensure a safe, secure-and fun-retirement. The fun part is why it makes sense to pay attention to the serious and perhaps boring part: planning how you'll get there.

Retirement planning is a process of setting retirement income goals and taking all the possible actions and making decisions, which are essential to achieve those retirement goals. Retirement planning includes evaluating sources of income, estimating expenses, and setting up an investment plan or savings plan to achieve the retirement goals by managing the risks and assets.

A significant part of retirement planning is identifying income sources, evaluating expenses, investing in savings programs, and managing the risks.

To put it simply, retirement planning means devising financial strategies that will help you save, spend, and invest according to your long-term goals in the later age. There are many financial instruments available that aid in retirement planning, depending on the individual's profile.

There is a scheduled investment withdrawal plan typically used in retirement, that is called Systematic Wthdrawal Plan (SWP). Investors can structure SWPs in various ways. Mutual funds typically allow an investor to determine a systematic withdrawal plan that includes interval payouts monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. It is an efficient tool to earn regular income after retirement. If you invest regularly and accumulate a tidy corpus in the initial years leading up to your retirement, the SWP facility can be successfully triggered upon your retirement.