Posts tagged with "asset-allocation"


  • Year In Review - 2023 Returns

    The last update in the year in review series is on my returns in 2023. In the short run, the returns might seem high or low, but in the long run it should match my expectation of 10%. That was the assumption I used when I decided to retire early. As long as I can keep my expenses inflation to around 6% and my returns to around 10%, I should be able to manage to live a decent retired life. Since it has only been about six years since my financial independence, there isn’t a lot of data to go with. But as you saw from my update on expenses, we have managed to keep our inflation to below 6%. Now the question is, were we able to keep our returns to above 10%? Lets find out.

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  • A Confusing Time In Stock Market

    The Indian stock market has been unrelenting in its growth. It feels like yesterday when I wrote that Sensex crossed the 60,000 milestone. Now, just 2 years later it is about to cross 70,000. But there is nothing impressive about it because that is a relatively low growth rate of 8%. Hardly anything to write about since we expect markets to do at least double digit growth. What is really impressive is that the market doubled in just three and a half years, which is a solid 22% growth. In June 2020, Sensex was around 35,000. The long term Sensex returns are around 13-14%. So should we be worried about a market crash?

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  • Revisiting My Stance on NPS

    It has been a while since I talked about NPS. At that time I did not consider NPS to be a good investment choice or an interesting asset class for a few reasons. A few things have changed with NPS and I have become older and perhaps wiser. Did my stance on NPS change now? Time to find out.

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  • Should You Sell Debt Or Equity For Retirement Expenses

    After reading my post on “withdrawal plan in retirement”, one reader asked why I suggested that one should sell debt mutual funds to handle the retirement expenses. In that post I gave an example where an investor has only debt and equity mutual funds and in that scenario, it is preferable to sell debt mutual funds to handle everyday expenses and then do a rebalance once in a while to get the asset allocation to the ratio that you prefer. The reason for this recommendation is quite simple. It is to avoid selling mutual fund units of an asset class at their low point. Since equity mutual funds go up and down quite a bit in value, it is possible that in some years you might sell at a low point and dent your compounding effect. I will explain how with an example.

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  • Withdrawal Plan In Retirement

    After my post on lumpsum vs SIP investment, a reader asked – “Wanted to understand the other side - how to redeem from our funds after we retire? Say we have calculated the number and we have enough. But, the challenge is how to get to a withdrawal mode from accumulation mode. You have showcased how you do it in some articles but can you do it with some numbers for a fictitious person? Ex: Age 40. Amount 6Cr spread across multiple equity and debt funds and US Stocks. Now, how to withdraw to last till their age of 85 for an expense of 1L per month (corpus is 50 times)?”. I thought it is an interesting question that needs answering. I will go with the numbers given by the reader and work out an example in this post.

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  • Lumpsum vs SIP

    Is it better to do a lumpsum investment or do systematic investment? Like many things in life, the answer is – it depends. There is usually no one good answer. But taking some examples we can see which works better in what situation. Of course these are just my opinions and they may not apply to your situation. Also, there may be many other cases which I do not cover. Finally, remember that whether you do lumpsum or SIP, in the long run the difference in returns will usually be miniscule unless you time the lumpsums very badly. With that out of the way, lets get to some examples.

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  • Reducing My Asset Allocation Swings

    Ever since I started investing back in 2011, I have always wanted to do tactical asset allocation. The idea was not to maximize returns, but to minimize volatility. Tactical asset allocation is different from the general advice which you receive from many people including me which is to keep a fixed asset allocation and rebalance once in a while to make sure that the asset allocation difference remains within a small range. That advice applies for any long term goal like retirement. For shorter goals you may receive advice to reduce equity allocation as you near the goal. If I did not make any sense there, then let me explain with an example.

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  • Year In Review – 2022 Net Worth

    The last post in the year in review series for the year is on my net worth. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically assets - liabilities. Some don’t agree with that formula, but I will continue to use it since that is what I have used in the past. If I change the formula now, then there will be discontinuity in the numbers. Moreover, since I don’t publish any numbers, it does not matter what my net worth really is. It is only to show how it has grown or fallen over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependent on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs).

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  • 4% Rule In Indian Context

    I have already written a few posts on 4% rule, but some readers were not sure if it really works in Indian context. We don’t have the equivalent of the Trinity study (which resulted in the 4% rule) done here in India. Or at least I am not aware of one. For those of you who don’t know the Trinity study, I will brief you on it. Basically the study found that if you withdraw 4% from your retirement account every year after accounting for inflation your retirement fund should last 30 years or more. But the study was done in the US using bond, inflation and equity market data from 1925 to 1995. It is really not a rule as much as a thumb rule. While I don’t have the luxury of such nice data for India, in this post, I will attempt to use some crude data loosely based on the same notion.

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  • Year In Review – 2021 Net Worth

    It has been a while but I just realized that I did not do my net worth analysis as part of my year in review series. So here we go. I am doing the net worth calculations using the very basic formula for net-worth which is basically assets - liabilities. Some don’t agree with that formula, but I will continue to use it since that is what I have used in the past. If I change the formula now, then there will be discontinuity in the numbers. Moreover, since I don’t publish any numbers, it does not matter what my net worth really is. It is only to show how it has grown over the years. My retirement is in no way dependent on my net worth. It is only dependant on my corpus of investments (debt MFs and equity MFs). Real estate is not an investment since I live in it.

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