Deepavali is a special day for most of us. During my childhood days, Deepavali used be my favourite day in the entire year, more precious than my birthday, last day of school closing for annual leave or other festival days. Its not the new clothes, savouries, sweets, meet and greet family and friends that made the difference but the Crackers! Things have changed a lot in the past 2 decades, when the interest level for crackers has waned significantly, even among small children. Ironically, the courts decide when the crackers are to be burst, day, date and time and mostly, the entire family gets glued to the idiot box!
Dhanteras is celebrated all over India on the 5th Nov, today and marks the beginning of Deepavali Celebrations! People pay respect to Lord Kubera and Goddess Lakshmi during this time. There is a long-standing custom of buying gold during Dhanteras. It is believed that a symbolic buying of gold, silver, jewellery, vehicles, property will act as a protection against ill will and bring good luck to every family member
“Goal based” investment has been gaining traction over a period of time. Among goals including buying a new house, medical corpus, world tour, kids’ higher education, retirement planning and creating a corpus for a trouble free (atleast w.r.t. to money) Golden age period is extremely critical. Various research studies show that Indians, relatively, attribute less importance to this when compared to people in other nations
We, typically give importance to our current needs like house, overseas vacations, kids education, marriage and tend to start thinking about retirement only in late forties or early fifties. In the current competitive world where disruption is the order of the day, unless we start thinking about retirement (I am referring to the cash flow part and not sitting in an easy chair and reading a newspaper free of work pressure!), early in our life, its not going to be a smooth ride. Unlike the government and public sector jobs, people working in private sector, professionals, business face the threat of stable jobs till 58 or 60 years. Retired people struggling with penury is becoming common now and more so since we have very little support from the government.
During this week from today to Friday, we are having a awareness drive to invest for retirement by initiating a SIP in Mutual Funds to emphasise the importance of Retirement goal and also use the auspicious period of Deepavali to protect us during the Retirement phase. I am anticipating every investor to contribute a new SIP this week (we have 8 already created even before publishing this note as and when I interacted with a few investors today) with the theme of “SIP for My Retirement”
SIPs can be as low as 1000/- per month and I want to use the opportunity for everyone to participate. Whether its 1000/- or a 1 lakh SIP does not matter but inculcating the practice to start building the retirement corpus is. While a SIP of 1000/- rupees or 1 Lakh may not be sufficient for retirement depending on our lifestyle, needs among others and requires a separate retirement planning session to figure out the corpus, we can be sure that everyone of us have started thinking about retirement.
I am not initiating a business drive with this and the intent is to have maximum number of people to participate rather than the business volume. I will be publishing the number of Individuals who participated in this initiative, not names or volume, next week. The statistics will be interesting to see how many can be nudged to start thinking and investing using this opportunity. Please don’t worry about the size of instalment and the key is to participate for the cause of “My Retirement” Read it as your retirement (and not mine by creating new business ?). Its probably a little late in the day but I was reading an article today morning which dwelled into challenges faced by retirees and took the cue from that.
Request you to send in a mail or message indicating the amount per month and we will work on setting up the plan with goal marked as “My Retirement”
<Blog # PenguWIN 1063 – Deepavali and SIP for My Retirement>