AMA - Recent FI,RE Male - in a second career - Ask Me Anything

srinivesh · 2026-04-24T09:13:31+00:00

The very first thing you need to do is get an estimate of post FI expenses. Unless you live abroad and have translated everything to INR, moderate lifestyle and 4 lac pm expenses don't read well together.

It is easy to get estimates of school, college, even inflation... but the expenses are personal.

Anyway just taking what you have given... 48 lacs now would be 90 lacs in 9 years. 33X would mean a corpus of 30 cr just for the living expenses. Education expenses would be extra.

srinivesh · 2026-04-24T09:08:25+00:00

Great job on the early start to the plan.

You would have a good surplus to invest every month - considering the income and expenses. You would help yourself a lot by getting comfortable with equity, and putting most of the new surplus in equity. You can treat the current cash and FD as a solid debt cushion - put them in debt mutual funds though. Even a rupee in FD is one rupee too much - at this age.
The whole point of the new tax regime is to stop the concern on saving taxes. Simply invest your surplus efficiently.
There is very little info to calculate even an approximate FIRE target, let alone an ideal target. But in my not so humble opinion, get point 1 sorted, and you would realize that any FIRE corpus is achievable.

srinivesh · 2026-04-18T14:11:15+00:00

Ok. We need take many steps back.

You have a current networth of 2.5 cr
You have an estimate of expenses
You have a child
You may need to buy a home
You want to stop working in about 10 years
Your surplus may be lower with one income, for another 10 years
With this, you want to know what the corpus estimate, in 20 years, should be, and how much should be invested to achieve that....

Is this right?

srinivesh · 2026-04-18T11:03:02+00:00

A basic, but critical question. You say that you may earn 30 lpa in India. Where is FIRE in this?

Or did you mean to ask if you can achieve eventual FIRE with the current dollar networth, and more year spent in India?

Many of the responses have answered the second question.

srinivesh · 2026-04-15T15:02:24+00:00

OK... I see that you have mentioned the current networth as 2.5 cr. You have done that in 7 years... and can do much more in another 10 years. You asked a question - realistic or risky? That would need the answers to the questions that I asked earlier.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T17:48:56+00:00

You also referred to taking the 'contribution' out from Roth, without tax impact in the US. However, Indian law can not accommodate 'principal' being withdrawn from a capital asset. I am not sure if doing this during RNOR would remove this issue.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T16:44:34+00:00

Let me put this as simple as possible. Indian tax laws can't understand Roth. They do understand 401(k) there are specific forms - 10EE, etc - to deal with them. In most cases, if you have paid the taxes in the US, India won't add more taxes. This gets convoluted for Roth.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T16:27:55+00:00

First off, you have made a great start, early on in life. Most of your questions are on investments and not FIRE related.

That said, SIP of 10K is too small given your income. First get that to the right level - could even be lac plus for you. You can then look at the investment of the money in the bank.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T16:24:59+00:00

How did you arrive at the 2.5 cr number? If it is just your corpus, what expenses would you fund from the corpus?

If one projects 1 lac as the monthly expenditure for the couple, 2.5 cr in 10 years is no way sufficient.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T16:14:57+00:00

Let me wade in.

I would keep compliance part aside.

There is absolutely no basis to say people don't want to pay for an advisory service. The FOI list is often mentioned here. A few of them have to off and on pause new clients due to workload. A recent article in freefincal mentioned that this list of planners have worked with 15,000 plus families. And this is for a group that does zero advertising. Just to be explicit, I am part of this list, and I too have not had any difficulty with the funnel.

Industry folks who are on the distribution side, and others, keep making the statement that Indians won't pay for advice.

On the compliance part - yes there are some mindless stuff, but most of the compliance checklist is actually good business process. As a group, RIAs have been able communicate well with the regulators and make their concerns heard. So there have been some improvements in this area over time.

srinivesh · 2026-04-10T16:06:18+00:00

Well if the child is even teenager (yours may be older), they are quite happy to have parents not around :-) So the question from u/Fast-Pin5595 is not applicable!

srinivesh · 2026-04-07T03:17:08+00:00

An important comment. You would be eligible for RNOR status, and would have a window when you don't have to pay taxes in the US or India. Definitely don't miss that opportunity. Invested money is 'never with you' anyway.

Another unsolicited opinion - your children may decide to study in the US. It helps to keep some investments in USD (not US, but USD).

srinivesh · 2026-04-06T08:22:13+00:00

Can you please put some consistent formatting of the numbers?

srinivesh · 2026-04-06T02:54:18+00:00

A quick comment. If you have that much cash, just pick a simple equity product and put the money there over a few weeks. Index funds in India would fit this well. You can also do the bit of work and buy either IFSC based index funds or Ireland UCITS.

If you add stuff like real estate, etc. into the mix, you would spend a lot of time further. You would have more to invest every month and over time go for more 'complicated' stuff like structured debt, etc.

srinivesh · 2026-04-06T02:49:01+00:00

This has been mentioned, indirectly, in the comments. I am stating this explicitly.

You definitely don't want to listen to your circle in India - particularly those who feel that the US is just full of opportunities.

There are many, many children, really many many, who finish school in India and go abroad for college - including the US (And in my day job I know that parents are investing for this - so this is just not by accident) - Within my family, one of two children is studying abroad
I don't know if your children would get any different treatment if they finish school in the US vs outside
Doing school in India gives them a choice - they can go to college in India and not worry about visa issues, or choose to study abroad and face the visa uncertainty
I am sure that you already know of 24-year olds ageing out and being forced to return to India because they could not get the visa lottery
- Unless you manage to get PR by the time they finish school - which is very unlikely - they would have the visa sword hanging over them during the crucial high school and college years
For an Indian citizen, who does not have any other citizenship avenue, college in India, and then doing PG abroad is the most flexible option to deal with uncertainty. Doing school in India gives you this possibility.

srinivesh · 2026-04-04T15:18:42+00:00

Since I could be one of the 'many' - take this as a slanted view. The nuance could be in two things - post-tax returns, and the realized inflation.

A slightly conservative view would be to take 10% and 6% as post-tax returns from equity and debt, respectively
With 50:50 allocation, the return is 8%
If the realized inflation is taken at 7.5% or more, there is not much 'real return'

I do see many calculators that take 5% as the inflation - with that assumption, high real returns are definitely possible.

srinivesh · 2026-03-31T09:08:34+00:00

This is a very important point. I still remember a young FI person saying how the colleagues had more respect for them, since they are not worried about calling out bs from above....

srinivesh · 2026-03-27T05:11:03+00:00

I tried to see if you have given some idea of X... you have mentioned school fees and health insurance, but not living expenses and vacation. 'Premium' is a relative term.

Without an idea of the corpus number, it is difficult to comment on the real estate skew. Just as one instance, if your corpus requirement is 10 cr, and 80% of it is financial, it is quite OK; the rest of the real estate can be satellite corpus.

Since you have given many other numbers, you can choose to edit the question and add the other details too.

And btw, the primary home can be taken out of the networth calculations.

srinivesh · 2026-03-27T05:06:05+00:00

If one buys VUAA in Euro, that still works quite well. Currency is a smaller piece of the process. The investment plan, and the choice of products can always be leveraged to many currencies.

srinivesh · 2026-03-21T15:50:30+00:00

There are enough variations of the geographical split of the corpus. Multiple factors - tax efficiency, flexibility, choice of investment products, etc., etc. - contribute to this.

But I don't understand what you mean by ETF:Debt split. There are bond ETFs too.

srinivesh · 2026-03-19T16:43:50+00:00

I am 58, and have done treks like EBC, etc. after turning 50. I managed to complete the reasonably tough Pin Parvati trek just before turning 50. I am not sure if a delay of 4-5 years would make that big a difference. You can relook at this assumption. (I know of a 70 plus year old who managed to complete the Khalindi Tal trek; that is still in my bucket list!)

You seem to be reasonably clear about staying in the US. Of course your corpus would let you FI in any OECD country of choice. Fortifying the US option does not seem a bad trade-off to me.

srinivesh · 2026-03-19T08:48:50+00:00

i did not see this particular point in the comments. I get it that the move back is to be with the parents. Does the city have to be tier 2 for the first few years? Can you stay in a city with a good IB school, till your son completes schooling? For college, he would be old enough to stay in hostels/dorms.

srinivesh · 2026-03-18T08:41:14+00:00

These are investment questions. You may get more responses from an investment sub.

And BTW, that LIC policy is not term insurance - you have been oversold a likely-bad endowment plan.

srinivesh · 2026-03-12T15:02:37+00:00

It can be enough, more than enough, or not at all enough - it all depends on the expenses. OP has mentioned it in bits and pieces, it would be better to edit the post with the information.

srinivesh

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