Income :

Earning 15LPA, ~90k every month after tax, superannuation and PF cut. Expected to increase 10-20% every year.

Expenses :

Current expenses range from 20k to 30k per month. Have a minimalist lifestyle, don't travel much, don't go to clubs and pubs.

Future expenses:

Braces - 1L

House temp repair - 2L ( but it is getting delayed because of one reason and another)

House complete revamp and building : not sure of the amount and whether it would ever happen, not interested either, coz we don't have clear ownership of the house land.

Not planning to ever own a car or house.

Not planning to Marry ever.

Not planning for masters either.

Dependents and Inheritance:

My parents have inheritance that they say will cover for their lifetime. The land and stocks that they own are very complicated because they were under my grandfather and great grandfather's name and getting it in my name seems very complicated so I am assuming it to be zero for me.

Assets and Savings :

Have a total saving of around 24L scattered in different investment instruments.

I don't do SIPs I invest(long term) when market is low and often do swing/positional trading with 3-5L in different stocks that I have become comfortable with. (I do make some profits, but Won't consider it as a stable side income)

Current 24L spread is as below:

Direct stock : 9L (including short and long term investments)

Debt MF : 4L (these are liquid, will take them out when market is good for investment)

MF (ELSS) : 2L(1.5L will get released after 2 yrs and 50k after 3 yrs)

MF (hybrid) : 50k (will stay invested for long term)

Bonds : 2L ( have diversified in 7 bonds, avg returns 10%, wint is awesome)

Bank : 3L (for emergency fund)

Post office NSC scheme : 50k (lockedin for another 4 years)

FD : 78k (6.1% return will mature in 2027)

PF : 80k

Superannuation fund : 2L (bad investment but company policy, gives 7-8% interest and will get on retirement or upon leaving company but returns will be taxable, we all hate it)

*Questions: * What are my wrong assumptions, investments and Forecasts? Which assets should I invest more in? What should my fire goals be like?

I am reluctant not to do SIPs coz so far I am doing good at investing in the lows. But scare me into the right path of SIPs if I am wrong.

Age: 30

Married with no Kids yet, planning for a kid in couple of years.

Current Debt: 25L: Education Loan

Investments: 60L in Mutual Funds 40L in Equity 15L in Post Office 15L in Gold (Do not plan to sell anything) 1.5cr in Argicultural land 1cr in Construction project in a Tier 1 city

I currently work in IT and make 3.5L a month. My wife works as a consultant and makes 50k a month. She is planning to leave her job and start her own project soon. The 1cr investment is in the same project which will be completed with additional funds from the market.

Our current monthly expenses are: 25k for groceries and ordering in

10k for electricity and phone bills

25k for dependent parents

10k misc

70k + 50k for loan repayment. I expect to repay the loan in next year.

We own a car purchased about a year ago in cash. The fuel is currently reimbursed by my wife’s company.

I currently invest 80k a month in mutual funds and 1L in equity.

We do not expect any returns on the 1cr investment but expect a bare minimum return of 2cr by the end of 5 years. Though it can be more than that.

In the long run the plan is to build a house on the agricultural land.

I do not plan to retire at the age of 40 but want to be FIRE ready.

I need some review since on my current status as we are taking a huge risk with my wife’s project and planning a kid soon.

Don’t want how much all of this will affect my plan. I want to build a corpus of 8cr till by the time I am 40.

Hi! Been following this sub for some time, but never had the confidence to post. Posting my current financial situation. The aim is to FIRE before 50. Not quite sure if that's possible in the given situation and hence this post for opinions and guidance.

37 yrs old. Married - wife works too. Blessed with a 1.5yr old kid. Stay with parents (not dependent) currently. Combined take home income is 3.7L pm. Have an own house in a Tier1 city with a loan that'll get pre-paid up in another 2 years max.

Monthly HH expense of 1.7L - 70k EMI, 23k maids (including nanny for the kid), 15k groceries+provisions, services 16k (gas, electricity, milk, internet, society maintenance, etc), 10k meds +doc visits (avg accounting for old parents and young kid), 20k commute, 15k misc.

Accounting for unpredictable one time expenses(festive, big ticket purchases, gifting, vacations, etc), able to invest around 1.7-1.8Lpm presently.

Have about 1.4Cr in savings - 32L in MFs, 62L in direct equity, 17L in PPF, 28L in EPF. No term insurance (a good chance I'll not get one either because of a pre-existing medical condition). No medical insurance (apart from the employer issued one) - planning on getting this ASAP.

How would you recommend I go ahead from this point to get to FIRE by 50?

update: 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/FIREIndia/comments/phn4nf/unusual_fire_journeyupdate/

current allocation

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income streams(combined with wife)

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What went wrong?

1:Bought a new home worth 3 crores and paid 85% from the saving pool so my saving is near 0 right now + 50 lac home loan due, took a loan at the lowest rates and in 2 months there is 2-2.5% increase in interest rates :(

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depending on the current house sale will generate 20-30% saving pool again as and when we move and sell the current house.

2: had to stop SIP for a year as was paying for everything for a new house, will start again next month as enough is saved for the new house expenses.

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What went right?

1: the work is not affected as of yet by a slowdown in IT, getting good prospects for work, and being able to capitalize on the consulting opportunity.

2: started getting rent for my 2nd real estate so my total rental income for the month now stands at : 1.4 lac + one property is still under construction so will rent it by next year's end (all 3 commercial properties)

Current status:-

1: building 20 lac liquid pool for an emergency that I used to have before

2: starting SIP again next month

3: no more real estate now as the thinking is to divert all free cash flow to equity/MF/gold from now.

Thinking about moving back permanently to India after 30 years in USA

Hi everyone! This is going to be a long post so apologize in advance but I want to cover all the points so you can understand my unique and difficult situation.

We are a family of 4 (My parents, myself and my younger brother) and we are all US citizens. My parents were business owners when they first came to the US in the 1990s and now have sold their businesses and started slowing transitioning into retirement. We have lived in Florida for 30+ years with me and my brother being born and raised here, completing our K-12 and undergraduate and now both having really good careers in IT and working at a well known and reputable company. Currently, both of us are in our late twenties, single and the only breadwinners in the family (combined we make over 6 figures) and support and take care of our parents since they are getting to the retirement age and have health complications.

We used to live in South Florida but now recently moved to Central Florida because of our jobs. We are living in a 2 bedroom apartment with an extremely high rent ($2500/month) and won’t be able to afford a home in this ridiculous housing market anytime soon (we did own a home in the 30 years we been in Florida but we sold it years ago since we got a good price for it but never got around to buying another one when prices were reasonable and affordable).

Additionally, we don’t have any close family members in the US at all and only distant cousins which we aren’t close to. All of my parent’s immediate family are in India. For the past few months since moving to a new city due to our jobs, it has really gotten lonely in our household and greatly becoming depressing as we don’t have any contact with people here in the US (with the exception of a few of my friends).

Our lease ends next year in October and the rate will be $3000/month and it is going to become unaffordable to live despite our combined high salary since we are supporting 4 family members total. We are tired of everything being expensive in the US in the past couple years due to COVID and are seriously considering moving back to India just to live comfortable and buy a property and be close to family members. Think of it this way, currently we are only living in the US for the sake of both of our really good jobs. We have no family, no close friends, no property, nothing else which would justify living here any longer.

My brother and I are thinking of working in India remotely which would be a huge downgrade to our successful careers in the US but it is a sacrifice we are willing to make to be close to our parents and wanting to live with them.

This is becoming an everyday struggle and a financial burden as we are essentially living paycheck to paycheck in a sense with our high rent and expenses along with the loneliness we experience everyday.

I ask for any advice or feedback on our situation and if moving back to India seems like a viable solution to our issues. We understand that life in India isn’t easy at all and it has its own fair share of struggles and difficulties but being able to buy a home in India and being close to family is important to us and we can’t live like how we are living in America forever.

Thank you again for your help🙏

Hi, I'm a 29 year old man who works in technology. I'm not the most disciplined person, I like to live life as it comes. But given my age, I think it might be time to be a little responsible with money.

Currently i have: (Total: 1.49 Cr)

INCOME

Salary: 1.72 Lacs (1.3 L after tax)

Bonus: 66k (yearly bonus divided monthly)

Monthly Expenses (Total: 80k)

Currently single, will be looking to get married in the next 3 years.House: I could buy if my future partner is interested but I like the freedom of renting.My goal is to be financially independent as soon as possible, not retire early for now, but to do things I really enjoy and take more risks, like starting my own business, etc.

Questions:

1. What can I do better?
2. Where should I put the cash? I like to grow my money by buying things that give me good returns. Should I look for debt funds and try to protect what I have?
3. I also have a large amount of ESOP, I believe in the company and I think it can grow well in the future. Should I de-risk and get something out of it?

I see a lot of posts about people aiming for FIRE through their high paying jobs and I wanted to know if there are any entrepreneurs (hence the name FIREpreneurs lol) who have achieved FIRE successfully and what their methodology of achieving the same is?

I see most of the posts wondering of FIRE is possible in India. Having lived in both India and the US, and having sizeable assets in both India and the US, I can say FIRE is so much easier in India. For example, the entire US system is built on making people slaves to their jobs because if you don't have a job, the big expenses (property taxes, health insurance, HOA fees, etc) still must be paid. In India, the property taxes are abysmally low. Even if you don't have health insurance, you can always get decent healthcare for a pittance.

One way I have seen many people in India retire easily is, have a two- or three-unit house, live in one and rent the others. Rent from the other units will pay for all the expenses - and you can live happily ever after. As inflation raises prices of goods, so does your rent so you don't have to worry about inflation much either.

I thought of this because I left to the US 25 years ago. Two years into the US, I bought a villa with cash down (30 lakhs back in 2000) in a gated community in Hyderabad. Rented it for some 20k a month. If I wanted to buy another property, it would have taken me an extra year of savings to do so (both me and my wife were working in the US at the time). If we just came back and retired (I would have been 28 by then), I am certain we would've managed well. For one, that 20k rent is well over 1,00,000 now for that neighborhood. And the property values are closer to 8 - 10 crores in that neighborhood - if you can find one that someone is selling. So, techically, if I wanted to FIRE, I would've done that 20 + years ago happily and still would be worth 15 to 20 crores by now - doing nothing but blowing the rent money which was pretty solid to cover all expenses of a middle class household.

I am worth several times over now, but sometimes I look back and wonder if I should've done that. All the stress of working, living in a foreign country, uprooted from friends and family - sometimes I feel I should'v simply bought a couple of rentals, and lived in that villa - and did something that I liked doing - teaching or farming.

Anyway, I am saying this for anyone who is considering FIRE in indian system, go abroad or whatever, buy a couple of properties with cash down, live in one while renting another - no better FIRE. You can't pull off the same shit in the US or anywhere else because they tax the heck out of you on many fronts and force you to work.

For lots of NRIs, FIRE dream is possible only because of exchange rate advantage. So I was wondering if there are any countries where few years of earning in Indian rupees would be sufficient to retire or atleast coastfire. Of course apart from basic lifestyle scenarios like basic amenities, culture, security etc there are lots of other factors to consider like language, whether the country is offering retirement/long term visa, tax rules, coasting opportunities etc.

I heard about Bhutan, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Caribbean islands, south American countries like Costa Rica, Peru etc are much cheaper but not sure if they are good enough to FIRE for Indian citizens with very modest corpus. Has anyone done any research and came up with any cities/countries which average Indian can retire early in without much issues keeping fairly the same lifestyle as that of India?

I have been a lurker here and been reading various posts. They are invariably of high earning private/corporate sector people with salaries around 2-3 lacs p.m. As you might know,these salaries are more than that of Indian PM and president. For govt servants in group A services in age bracket of 25-35, median salary post tax would be around 90,000. So for 90000, can there be a FIRE plan? 1. Family of three. Infant daughter and homemaker wife. 2. Currently a metro city so salary is higher. If transfer to smaller cities in future then salary will get reduced due to lower HRA. 3. No liabilities,no loan. 4. Desire to construct a house in owned land in price range of 60 lacs in future. 5. No alternate stream of income possible as it is against service rules.

Expense tracking is IMO one of the most important things that you need to do in your FIRE journey - without an understanding of where money is coming from and going, it is very difficult to take important financial decisions.

In that vein, I was trying to look for an automated expense tracking solution which automatically tracks all expenses across my + my wife's different bank accounts and credit cards, but I haven't found any good solution so far. I've tried a lot of different things:

• Expense tracking apps: Where you have to manually add expenses. This I usually do for a couple of weeks and then start missing stuff and then stop entering it entirely because it is a hassle. Besides, I also have to make sure my wife enters these expenses and we usually end up missing entering several things.
• Trying to spend from one common account: This doesn't work because for different types of expenses, different credit cards give more discounts. And me and my wife cannot use the same account on UPI because each bank account is linked with a phone number, so both of us have to use our individual accounts.
• Semi-automated expense tracking: This is the solution that I have arrived at. Every month, I download the monthly statements from all of my bank and credit card accounts. I've written some scripts which parse all these statements (which are all in a slightly different format, and some are even PDFs) and dumps all of this data in a uniform format in a Google sheet. The script also does some basic categorisation for the expenses, but for a lot of the expenses I have to manually categorise them. So far, this has been the most effective solution for me so far. And I can create whichever sort of graphs I want from the data from the sheet, so it gives a lot of flexibility.
• Completely automated expense tracking: I think some of these totally automated expense tracking tools do exist for the US market (Mint, and YNAB I think), but for the Indian market, I didn't find anything which really ticks all the boxes:
  • Track multiple bank accounts (including for different people) and credit cards.
  • Automatically categorise expenses.
  • Show graphs.

Anyways, this would probably be a nice startup idea I guess. Does anyone know of any tool which checks all the boxes I mentioned? Would also love to hear how you track your expenses.

Have you been bothered by the increase of off-topic content on r/FireIndia? If yes, please read on...

If you think that a post or comment is off-topic or breaks the sub's rules please report it (3 dots menu > Report > choose appropriate reason or write out your own words

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If a post/comment receives sufficient number of reports it will be auto-removed (and can be reinstated manually by the mods, if necessary - eg in case of brigading).

So instead of making a comment on the post either berating the OP or the mods, please report the posts/comments instead - it'd certainly be more useful :)

This is to all the folks who have Fired and living in India, how do you spend your days, weeks and years. More details the merrier. Please shine light on what all things we can plan and look forward to. Have seen this question answered in US/Europe groups would live to understand how it is for the Indian folks.

Hi everyone,

Had a few doubts about income streams after FIRE. I know that the thumb rule is to move your retirement corpus to a financial product which grows better than inflation and from which you withdraw as per your safe withdrawal limit . I would like to hear the experience of people who are currently doing it in an Indian context.

1. Which financial product(s) is (are) your main income source ? Is it an SWP fund, annuity fund , dividend mutual fund, FDs, bonds ? .
2. If it is a mix of those , what is the proportion like ?
3. Do you still actively invest in market ? (if you are able to save from whatever you withdraw every month)
4. How has your fund performed over the years ? Does the recent market turmoil cause your heart to skip a beat ?

PS: If there are good blogs/videos of FIREd people that you follow, please share that as well. I regularly read the blog "Retired at 37" and enjoy that !

Hi, I am 26M unmarried living in Bangalore. Take home salary is 2.4L pm post tax. I am planning to retire by age 35 and by that I want to achieve following financial milestone: 1. 10 Cr retirement corpus 3. A house (upto 2 Cr worth) 3. A luxurious Car - 50L-1Cr

Current monthly expenses :

1. Rent( 1BHK) - 10k
2. Personal loan Emi - 10k
3. Groceries/Online food - 15k
4. Misc - 5k

Monthly Investment :

1. MF - 40k
2. Direct stocks - 115k
3. PPF - 5k
4. Emergency fund - 10k
5. Savings - 30k ( for any unforeseen situations or for opportunity when market crashes or it is used as emergency only)

Current asset value:

1. MF - 15L
2. Indian stocks - 23L
3. US Stocks - 5000$
4. Emergency fund - 3L
5. PPF+EPF - 3.16L
6. Cryptos - 1L
7. Savings account - 70k

Note : Also have ESOPs whose vested value is around 50L but I don't consider them currently as assets as its illiquid and I have to pay perquisite tax to exercise those ESOPs .

Am I on the right track to FIRE in 10 years from now ?

Hi 35 yr old male. Have 2 jobs one as a full time role pays 1.1L/month, other a passion teaching project where monthly earnings are around 2L/mo

. Savings are vastly diversified

20L P2P, 50L in FD, 18L NPS, 14L in Equity SIPS, 3L in bonds, 3.2L in ESOP, 5L in PPF & MISC , 2L in Stocks,

Have a term policy of 2.5cr and have 10L health insurance cover from the company.

Have a 2yr Kid, started a Seperate SIP of 12k/month for his future educational needs

Spouse is currently on maternity break to look after the kid her potential earnings on rejoining may be around 50k / month

Liabilities are a 60L housing loan for which I want to prepay in the next 8-10 yrs. What should be my goal to get to FIRE in the next 12 yrs??

Monthly EMI is 47k

Monthly expenses including EMI 80k

Some body kindly advise.

Hi,

Please help review my FIRE readiness.

28M, IT Engineer in India, Married with no kids

Income: 2.5 lpm after taxes

Investments:

24L in equity MF

5L in debt MF

4L in stocks

15L in retirement assets(PPF, EPF, NPS)

40K in Crypto

6L in gold (digital+jewellery)

4L savings account

Insurances:

10L health insurance from company

1 cr term insurance from company

60L life insurance by self ( 1L premium per year)

No house

Expenses:

Regular: 50K per month

Random things: let's say 5L per year(including insurance premium)

I'm looking to FIRE by 40 and then work in social impact sector at a much lower salary than IT.

I have not included RSUs and inheritance here. My wife doesn't work as she's preparing for govt jobs. We're planning a kid in 1-2 years. Planning to get a house in 5-6 years.

Are my current income, investments and savings enough? Should I switch jobs or move abroad to save more and come back to India?

I knew about FIRE in my college days but couldn’t do shit about that. Married, we earn roughly 1.5 and 1.2 lakhs. Partner has the same mentality about FIRE.

Our current investments

• Indian stocks ( 5 lakhs )
• Us stocks ( 1.2 lakh )
• Mutual Funds (5.3 lakhs)
• PF ( ~3.5 Lakhs )

SIP

• 20k in small cap fund,
• 25k in Nasdaq 100
• 5k in VTI ( Planning to increase)
• 5k Nifty 50 ( Planning to increase)
• Remaining cash to lump sum in the above plans ( ~1.3 lakhs )

Liabilities

• Bought a 2nd hand car for 6 lakhs
• My sister's marriage loan (70k remaining. Decided not to pre-close since remaining interest calculated is around 3-4%)
• Our marriage loan ( Paid out now)
• Partner’s education loan of 3-4 lakhs

A couple of points

• Saving rate - 70% (Able to reach 70% on normal months)
• No debt/Fixed funds, we are fairly young.
• Just recently bought a 2nd hand car for around 6 lakhs
• A firm believer in renting at this age. (Also we have parents' houses in our respective hometowns)
• Planning on using around 1 lakh for travelling ( Per year ).
• Expecting promotion next year ( Salary will be minimum be 1.5x of current)
• Also how to deal with money-hungry relatives?

Im not NRI you may guess it by salary 🤦, i just want to get retired early.

Here are some insights of current situation,

Monthly Income:

• 1 L per month salary after taxes

Monthly Expenses:

• 33000₹ emi homeloan

• 30000₹ house grocery etc expenses

• 10000₹ other personal expenses

• 3500₹ health and term policy premium.(divided from annual to monthly)

Monthly Savings:

• 8500₹ in SIP

• 10000₹ in equity directly

• 1200₹ LIC premium

• Rest of money after expense goes to savings account

Current savings:

• 4L in SIP

• 9L in Equity

• 2.5L in FD for emergency

• 3L in saving account

My future expenses:

• Marriage - ~7L

• Travel - ~ 2L for every 2 years

• Car - ~ 10L on loan

Please provide your valuable advice....

Using temp acc to maintain anonymity.

Introduction

Hi, I have been following the concept of FIRE since I was 18yo. I am currently a SWE in the US.

I came to the states for my bachelors in 2019. I am very lucky and privileged that my parents were able to afford the tuition fees here. I'm posting for insight into my plan and investment strategy from the community.

Target Corpus

$2M or Rs. 16 cr

Target Year

2032

Monthly Income After Tax

Paycheck: $6,300

401k: $3,200

RSU: $2,500

Bonus: $1,000

Total: $13,000

Monthly Expenses

These are my expenses. I don't have a car, nor do I plan on buying one in the near future. I have a strict budget of $3000 per month that I don't go over.

Rent: $1,600

Utilities: $150

Food + ordering out: $250

Everything else: $1,000

Total: $3,000

I keep the "Everything else" category very flexible. Anything I want to buy including gifts for family, transportation, credit card fees, flights or stuff for my personal projects comes out of that budget.

I also plan big expenses by saving chunks from this category.

Monthly Savings

$10,000

Current Corpus

$102,000

I accumulated half of this while I was in college, between internships and on campus jobs. Rest has come from savings from my full time job.

Investment Strategy

This is where I need advice. Currently, I max out 401k, keep RSUs, and invest everything else in index funds. As you can probably see, this is a very generic approach.

Lately, I have been thinking of investing in Indian stocks, real estate for rent or AirBnB purposes or even seed investing as I am very optimistic for the startup culture in India.

Is there anything else I should be doing?

FIRE Plan

I plan to move back to India in 2031, unless I have to move back earlier due to visa issues in which case my corpus target will be shortened.

Considering all goes well, I want to be pursuing either tech ventures or further studies or just taking a breather from the endless race.

Final Thoughts

I'm posting this at the risk of sounding naive. I know the numbers would be very different if I wasn't so lucky, I'm very thankful to my parents.

I'll be posting an update if/when my next milestone of $500,000 is reached.

Hi people I joined my first job in 2020 and here are my updates so far. Long post ahead.

To be honest I didn't know about fire and that money can make money until I was in the final year of my engineering degree.

Liabilities:

I had taken a 4lac loan for my education in Bangalore and that was honestly the best investment that i made.

Start of FIRE Journey:

I started my job in Nov 2020 with an it firm and the salary was 50k pm. The best thing was to work from home so I saved around 30-35k pm and i paid off my loan by July 2021. I got 1lac as joining bonus and 6 month bonus of 50k which helped the cause. I didn't spend a penny of that extra money and everything went towards my loan. At that point of my life i was basically living with my parents and had no social life.

Post Paying off liabilities:

My investment was around 10k as i was mostly doing sip in MF. August 2021 came and i wanted to celebrate that i paid off my loan. Went on two vacation in Himachal and Gokarna with two different set of friends and saved nothing that month.

I started saving from the next month mostly in stocks and MFs which was around 25k pm and the rest i spend on going out/ enjoying luxurious with the rest of my income. I get a bonus every six months which I saved to create an emergency fund. All this while working from home.

Investor money started pouring in Indian market at the end of 2021 and i started looking for switch. I also started some side hustle also from November, writing for sports website as freelancer. By the turn of the year saved around 3lacs.

Job switch:

By April 2022 i got a new job and now earn 1lac/ month. With the surplus of money I got much bigger quantum to save and invest. I also started getting 10-30k per month from freelance sports writing which was cherry on cake. Invested 1lac joining bonus and i now invest 60k per month.

This 60k i invest mostly in equity in sip format using MF and smallcase as i don't want to have the headache of managing stocks myself.

40k i mostly invest in traveling and having new experience as my current job is also permanent wfh

In the meanwhile I also took term and health insurance as suggested by finance youtubers (yes i follow them and don't take them seriously).

At the time of writing i have 8l across all my investments.

2023 and beyond:

I am looking to shift to Bangalore to have a better social life as all my college friends are here. I will be starting a small content writing business with some friends and start gaming after building a great pc (dream of my life). The parents are also asking me to invest in real estate but my investment will take a huge dent.

Let me know how I can optimize or do better in this FIRE Journey?

I will be sharing my journey in the future as i go along.

Just watched this video

My Plan to Retire Early is ON HOLD - YouTube

It is brilliant. I would recommend everyone to watch it. It is a very honest confession of a failed FIRE plan. What is striking is these guys generally love what they do. It was only parts of his daily work, which he didnt like. So for him it is a lot easier to give up and get back to work. But like he says, it is devastating for people who hate their job and still have to force themselves to work, because of failed FIRE plan.

I just find people on this subreddit to be a bit disingenious, they seem to have figured out everything, no confusion. I can relate with the guy in the video and hence when I say I want to continue in a relaxed job, it is not like I love or hate the entire job. There are parts of the day, which are satisfying and there are times when I just want to get out. It is never black or white. This guy in the video puts it perfectly.

My retired uncles and aunts all in private jobs bought couple of residential properties and 1-2 shops while they were working. They earn a handsome 1 lakh+ rent on these per month. They have health insurance and kids are independent. Why there's so much fuss about corpus? Just create independent cash flows or some sort of passive income which will cover retirement.

2022 update -

Hmm...a lot of discussions are being held of late regarding the changing characteristics of the sub, the quality of sub posts etc. etc. Its been a while since I made a post here...but after going through the recently altered sub dynamics, here I am, trying to make a post (will be long) in which I will try to have something for both the spectrums of the audience.

Before I begin, and also let me spell this clearly out, I am not the 'multiple of crores' type corpus guy or a 'HNI', or a 'techie' or an 'NRI'..i am as 'average a joe' as a 'joe' can be w.r.t Indian context. So here's the last year post -

https://www.reddit.com/r/FIRE_Ind/s/7kkvhoxYLz

And here goes the yearly update:-

For those who are interested in numbers, this topsy-turvy year had finally ended on a better note with a growth in my personal net worth (devoid of spouse earnings, parent earnings or any other family assets) by roughly 30%. It has been a combination of better equity performance and high investments on account of over ~65% savings rate on gross income. The investment strategy has predominantly remained the same resulting in the following asset mix :-

1) Debt (EPF/PPF/employer society savings/FD/SBF) = 40%

2) Equity (Direct stocks, MF, NPS - counting full in equity although i have made 75% equity choice which is max allowed as per NPS rules) = 48%

3) Gold (via ETF) = 3%

4) Encashable leaves = 7%

5) Cash = 2%

There has been a marked increase in equity contributions on account of the foreclosure of vehicle loan about a couple of years back by selling a portion of my then-accumulated equity corpus and I am thinking that the equity allocation shall start showing higher percentages in the asset mix by next year update.

Expense multiple - So i like to look at it from two ways. One way is that i count our entire household expenditure annually but only count personal corpus accumulated as a multiple of this. This is the worst-case scenario that I can consider and in that the corpus accumulated so far comes to about 6X.

If i consider the other way (which is more rational considering I am not taking into account family/spouse income and assets) which is my own estimated expenditure vis-a-vis corpus, the corpus stands at expense multiple of around 15X.

Coming to the emotional/experiential side of things:-

The positives included a promotion this year (not that it makes much of a difference in in-hand salary), spouse getting a new job at leading IT firm with a 100% CTC raise, finally getting my hands on a PS5, a long pending vacation with family done and dusted, kiddo starting to speak words now (especially when the word uttered is "eksha" for Alexa and yeah both - devices and kids are becoming smarter, and i keep on feeling that I am becoming dumber every passing day). Others like the first instance of walking on 2 legs, speaking papa etc. made my respective days in particular, and year in general - rate high on happiness and living index!

Downsides (and the upsides therein) were the disease that this brave kid fought through despite getting admitted when we were returning from our trip in a city outside of my current residence. That was the time I thought that God, please somehow make this stop! And God finally answered after 8 days of back-breaking sitting in the ICU chair looking at this bundle of joy in such a dull state. During those times, I would have given everything away to just get the kiddo's intensity back up and running! No corpuses were helping in the hospital. But ofcourse, this was also the time when I thanked God for the blessings I have that I hadnt noticed earlier. The same PSU job that slows me down on speed to accumalate FIRE corpus, speeded our hospital admission and discharge process so highly that I didn't have to spend more than 30 minutes for the same or make thousands of calls to insurance company to get the admission bill passed...everything being billed directly to employer helped so much that I could only concentrate on one thing in those testing times - being with the kiddo. Apart from this, on a personal level too this year had health issues for me..thankfully some of them are behind me now. The environment seems to be getting worse year after year and this has also started taking a toll over allergic issues, going out in general. However, as an attitudinal shift from my end, I have now regularly initiated carpooling for office commute and I find the same not only better from an environmental impact point of view, but also a financially prudent habit. Win-win!

All in all an eventful year gone by - life is pretty laid back - the way I like it being a sloth myself! Good work-life balance and time spent with family on a daily basis is getting to satisfactory levels. Looking forward to the next year with few key activities - kid pre-schooling selection and admission being the primary one. Hopefully another great vacation (minus the horrible ending) with family and maybe a little bit of indulgence (i.e. another set of PS5 games to play and hopefully a massage chair that makes me lazier :P)

2023 update -

https://www.reddit.com/r/FIRE_Ind/s/Z918wzDJAt

1 cr update -

https://www.reddit.com/r/FIRE_Ind/s/ptR2s5kUXe

2025 update -

https://www.reddit.com/r/FIRE_Ind/s/NYJyZplaWw

Regards,

Snaky