The hard-earned retirement corpus secured in accounts such as the NPS, PPF, and/or the EPF is the final nest egg for public or private sector individuals who retire after a few decades of continuous service. While certain central government retirees are eligible for pension and lumpsum fund benefits, almost all the private sector employees are not entitled to a pension from their employers and have to fall back on lumpsum (defined contribution plan) corpuses.
As a result, the post-retirement monthly expenditures of the family, most often, depend on corpus inwards from such accounts. There are two important considerations for such corpus inward for individuals – Safety and return on such corpus since this impacts the amount of derived pension on the same for the rest of the life.
Upon retirement, most individuals rely on traditional plans such as a combination of fixed deposits, Sr Citizen savings Schemes, and/or plain vanilla Savings accounts to create cash flows for longer duration and this raises several risks to the safety of corpus, interest rate risk and thereby risk of variability of periodic cash flows and the possibility of hardships during retirement years.
Annuities should be the preferred choice for retired individuals; however, this product is not very popular due to a lack of awareness, perceived lower rate of returns, and liquidity issues. Annuities offer the best hedge against the variability of cash flows, against interest rate risks, and consistent cash flows for most of the living life.
Today annuities offer a wide range of choices that were not available 5-10 years ago. Flexibility, market comparable rate of return, and a wide range of options are available from over half a dozen annuity service providers. Besides this, regulations and oversight of annuity providers make this product extremely safe as compared to other market-linked products.
A quick glance at the variety of options from annuity service providers is summarized as below.
| Table 1: Choose the option wisely | ||||
| Annuity for life | Annuity for life with return of purchase price on death | Annuity payable for life with 100% annuity payable to spouse on the death of the annuitant | Annuity for life with a provision for 100% of the annuity payable to the spouse of the annuitant for life on death of the annuitant, with the return of purchase price on the death of the last survivor | Annuity payments would be made to the annuitant and his/ her spouse throughout their lifetime. Thereafter, these pay-outs would be made to the subscriber’s mother and after her, to the father. On the death of the father, the purchase price would be refunded to the annuitant’s child/ nominee. |
| Source: NPSTRUST.org.in | ||||
This depends upon a variety of factors and the retired individual’s objective, dependents, and other personal factors. For instance, for couples with no dependents, the easiest choice would be to choose option 1: Annuity for life. Here, they are likely to enjoy higher cash flows or put in lower corpus to enjoy required cash flows. The standard of living could be higher for such couples since this option pays the highest pension as compared with other plans across annuity service providers. Options #2 and #3 might suit retired couples with legal heir (children/grandchildren) where they might want to gift such corpus earned.
Option #4 & #5 could severely impact the current cash flow for the retired individual since the objective is to return the corpus. Unless there is adequate liquidity and other assets these options defeat the very purpose of buying an annuity and therefore can be avoided.
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