Retirement Planning Checklist: Where to Start

1. Estimate your retirement timeline. Knowing roughly how many years you have until retirement shapes almost every other decision, including how much risk your portfolio can reasonably take on.

2. Estimate your future expenses, not just your current ones. Retirement expenses often shift, lower on commuting and work-related costs, potentially higher on healthcare, so a rough future-expense estimate is more useful than simply extending today's budget.

3. Account for inflation over the full time horizon. Even moderate inflation compounds significantly over 20 to 30 years, and a retirement corpus that looks large today may fall short decades from now if inflation is not factored in.

4. Review your existing retirement-linked investments, including EPF, PPF, NPS, and any existing mutual fund holdings, before deciding what additional investing is needed to close the gap.

5. Consider a mix of retirement-focused vehicles. The National Pension System (NPS), for instance, is a long-term, retirement-focused investment framework designed to help build a retirement corpus systematically.

6. Build in a health insurance buffer. Healthcare costs are one of the most common reasons a retirement plan comes under pressure, and adequate health cover reduces the chance that a medical event derails your corpus.

7. Revisit the plan periodically. A retirement plan built once and never reviewed rarely stays aligned with changing income, expenses, and goals. A periodic review keeps the plan realistic.

This checklist is educational and general in nature. Your own retirement plan should be built around your specific goals, timeline, and risk profile.