Nobel Prize-winning economist, William Sharpe (the joint-father of modern investing and the person after whom the Sharpe Ratio is named), calls Retirement Planning and investing for it, “the nastiest, hardest problem in finance”.
If the above statement sounds like an exaggeration, it’s probably because high-quality Financial Planning is almost non-existent. A financially realistic illustration would help to illustrate one minor aspect of the above statement:
Let’s say that Achilles, who is 40 years old, has already saved enough for his children’s higher education and he is now going to start saving for retirement. He and his adviser calculate that he has to save 40% of his post-tax salary for retirement, which leaves him with 60% to spend on a comfortable lifestyle.
Achilles eventually retires at the age of 60. If at that point he realizes that the earlier calculation was overly optimistic and corrects it, then he will have to cut down his lifestyle by 56%. However, if he unfortunately realizes this only at the age of 70, then at that point, he will have to cut down his lifestyle by 83%. In the extreme scenario in which he realizes this only at the age of 73, then he would have completely run out of money and hence he would be on his deathbed—unless his children bail him out.
The above illustration hints at the fact that, within Financial Planning, the component of Retirement Planning is the most complex. And since Retirement Planning and investing for it is the hardest problem in finance, it would therefore be prudent for almost everyone to engage with a competent Hourly-Fee Financial Planner and SEBI Registered Investment Adviser.
Executive Summary
- Avinash Luthria, Hourly-Fee Financial Planner & SEBI Registered Investment Adviser (RIA)
- Former Private Equity investor
- Total of 24 years of experience including...
- 12 years of experience as a senior Private Equity / Venture Capital investor
- 6+ years of experience as an Hourly-Fee Financial Planner & SEBI RIA
- MBA in Finance from IIM Bangalore
- Two-year full-time MBA in Finance from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) i.e. top-3 MBA in India
- Including myself, there are a total of only two Hourly-Fee / Fixed-Fee RIAs in India with a two-year full-time MBA (Finance) from a top-4 IIM
- The other such person became an RIA in 2024
- Note: One-year MBA courses and Part-time MBA courses from the IIMs have a massively lower bar to accept students
- The first Hourly-Fee Financial Planner in India and the third Hourly-Fee Financial Planner in the World
- Hourly-Fee is the most transparent Financial Planning fee structure in the world which results in the highest alignment between the client's interests and the RIA
- There are only 8 Hourly-Fee Financial Planners in India
- The only Financial Planner in India to recommend only Passive Index Funds and to avoid all Active Investing
- The first RIA in India to publicly recommend investing only in Passive Index Funds
- Focus on clients who are knowledgeable about personal finance and investing
- Hence I deliberately do not have any team mambers
- Follow a 5-hour Customized Process, not the 2-hour Robo++ Process
- Cumulatively engaged with 100+ High Net worth client families
- Client families meet the age-wise net worth criteria suggested on the Fees page of this website
- One of the first-ten Hourly-Fee / Fixed-Fee RIAs in India
- 'Fee-Only' i.e. Zero commissions
- Articles in Business Standard / Mint / The Ken / Bloomberg Quint
- Note: Due to a bandwidth constraint at my end, there may have to be a delay in the start of the engagement. As I get more information about my workload, I will let you know about this including during the Introductory call
- Since there are people who try to impersonate RIAs, please do not pay any fees till BOTH (a) you send a detailed introductory email to [email protected] AND (b) I reply from the email address [email protected] to the exact same detailed introductory email that you sent, we do a 30 minute introductory call, we sign an agreement and then I request for payment of fees
- FYI: I have never contacted a single potential client i.e. every single potential client has contacted me to become a client...
- I have never recommended even one specific equity share or trade to any client...
- I see every single active mutual fund, PMS, long-short AIF etc as a waste of money and fees