Just one question can help you to decide whether you are a responsible person. If you are a responsible person, one of the first things you would do is secure your life by ensuring a steady income after your retirement age. If you don’t do that, you are making a big mistake. If you spend excessively on pleasure during your youth, you will find plenty of time for regretting your mistakes at leisure once you retire and settle down for the rest of your life.
If you are smart, you will start earning and investing at a young age. The sooner you start, the better. In the south Indian language—Tamil—someone once wrote: We start our education at the age of five and pick up a job by the time we are 20 years of age. If we persist with our job for 20 years, we become tired at age 40. But people who have grit and determination to slog further, get retired at the age of 60. Sixty is the normal retirement age in India though there are some organizations which fix the retirement age at 58. It is quite possible that the retirement age in your country is at variance with this. That does not matter. The important thing is that you start investing at the age of 20.
By the time you are 30, start looking for a side-hustle or generating a source of income in addition to your salary income. That’s a good time to do that because you would have had sufficient time to settle down in your job by that time.
If you are approaching your 40th birthday, you should have bought a home, purchased a vehicle, made sufficient arrangements for the education of your children, acquired everything that you need to lead a comfortable life, and paid back the loans you raised for them. In other words, you should be free of all financial burden by that age.
From age 40 to 60, you should focus entirely on earning as much as you can, saving as much as possible, and investing your savings intelligently to make as much money out of that as possible.
By the time you retire, you must have a secured monthly passive income—be it in the form of rent, interest, or return on your investments–to take care of your day-to-day expenses. And, you must have a huge sum stacked away for health or medical emergencies and contingencies that pop up from nowhere.
If you fail to do all these in good time, you are making the biggest mistake of your life!
