To most people retirement is an age. It of course depends on your health, the company you work for etc. However in the first chapter I would like to introduce you to the concept that retirement is an amount of money! After all, if you have that magical amount why not retire early?The second chapter takes you through the steps and importance of planning, and to the dangers of not planning. Like any financial goal, retirement is also a goal and has to be approached in a financial planning mode. So Retirement Goal Setting becomes a very important and is perhaps the first step in Retirement planning.How much money is adequate for a person to retire? It is a question that is very difficult to answer. Here is a generic answer telling you what are the factors to consider while trying to answer this question. This chapter has many pointers and a calculator which leads you towards the answer. Remember this is not an answer cast in stone as the facts keep changing, so will your answer. Can you really retire by investing an amount as little as Rs. 40 a day? The answer is yes it is the power of compounding. If you do have n or time on your side, it is possible to retire on an amount as small as Rs. 40 a day. And the fantastic thing is that this small amount can be got by making very simple changes in your life style.We then deal with Annuity the withdrawal stage. After all if you have accumulated money for your retirement, you should also know how to withdraw. Here we deal with what is annuity, what are the methods of creating annuities, what options are available, and the works about annuity.Retirement savings and investments are invested in various instruments. A book cannot really do justice to all the schemes that are currently available. However here is an attempt at that. It is accurate to the extent that the sources from where the details have been taken are up to date! There are books specializing in information about investment products which are produced on a yearly basis. One book which immediately comes to mind is In the Wonderland of Investments by Mr. Shanbag. A few chapters are devoted to answering how much and what type of insurance should you look at during retirement, the attitude of the Indian family to retirement, the need to make a will, some retirement blunders, etc. The book is rounded off with some useful calculators regarding how much to save, effect of inflation etc. These are simple calculators which can be created in excel. Some of these calculators can be found on websites like moneycontrol.com or in google.
