If you are a salaried employee and have no other source of income, you must first save 20% of your income. If you can manage to do this, you will not have to be dependent on your children during your retirement, and you can build a very good corpus. Let us understand this with an example. If your current age is 25 years and your monthly salary is ₹100,000, you should mentally assume that your salary is only ₹80,000 and plan your expenses accordingly. By doing this, you will not face major issues. There might be a few challenges initially, but you will overcome them over time. If you invest ₹20,000 monthly into equity mutual funds for at least 25 years—until you turn 50—and step up this investment by 5% every year as your salary increases, you will see that you have accumulated a substantial amount of money. You can build a portfolio of ₹7 crores at a 14% Rate of Return (ROR). This is entirely possible.
