Am I Earning Enough

Being a salaried employee, the bulk of my dreams of an early retirement are funded by what my corporate employer chooses to pay me every year.  My fortunes are inextricably linked to my salary.  I have tried over the years to build a secondary stream of passive income, but progress has been slow on this front.  So I figured I should take a minute to get a handle on my salary progressing over my working career. It took me a while to dig up the data, since this is something I have never really separately tracked. I have always focused on my networth, and my savings rate, but never really looked at how much my income is, and more importantly, how it has been increasing/decreasing over the years.

NSDL CAS : One stop window into all your investments

One of the most common challenges of the early retirement or personal finance enthusiast, is the ability to meaningfully track all their investments from a common platform.  The investment avenues are so diverse in India, that typically your investment universe is spread across everything from your friendly neighborhood banks, online brokerage portals, MF AMCs, online portfolio management tools, your own local excel spreadsheets, insurance agents, relationship managers, post-offices, and the list can go on and on.  How does one really manage all of these different avenues, and more importantly is there a single platform from which you can access and view all your different investments?  If this sounds familiar, read on.

Quotes : Do It NOW!

A good plan violently executed NOW is better than a perfect plan executed next week

-George S Patton

Quotes : Millionaire Next Door

Whatever your income, always live below your means

-  Thomas J. Stanley, The Millionaire Next Door

How to Retire Early : Equities, Equities and More Equities

If you have been reading early retirement blogs regularly, and researching the web and books for strategies to achieve your early retirement goals, you must be very clear in your mind that saving a large enough corpus for early retirement is a very daunting task.  

In India, and I am sure pretty much everywhere else in the world, saving enough just for a regular retirement wherein you retire by 60 years, is tough enough.  Amassing wealth at a faster pace, so you can accumulate a sufficient corpus at a younger age, and leave the daily grind of the corporate work force, is a mind boggling challenge.  

I have written before on this blog about the need to save as much as possible, as a percentage of your take home income.  However, I am also looking for ways to increase my return on investments, to accelerate the rate at which my total corpus grows.  

Networth Calculator

Earlier I had posted a web article, describing how much net worth you should have accumulated by a certain age, with a table showing how you can calculate your expected networth, based on a few assumptions that you can make.  Here is a online calculator that you can use to estimate your expected networth with any starting assumptions you want to make, suitable to your personal situation.

Here are some recommendations on how to use this online calculator

Am I Saving Enough?

I had published this post a couple of days ago, based on a concept borrowed from the book "The Millionaire Next Door" about your expected networth or corpus at any given age.  The post describes how to calculate your expected networth assuming you save at a certain rate, and your investments and salary grows at a certain rate.  Since that post, I have got several queries from readers for their specific situations that I am doing my best to respond to.  One recurring question is around the annual salary assumption I have made.  Since different people have different salaries when they started, either higher or lower than my assumption in the table calculation, the common question is, how do I calculate my expected corpus for my salary situation.