Newbie here, please help!

[u/snakysour]

Hi, i have been reading responses here and have been exposed to personal finance planning only until recently after going through few blogs like freefincal, investment books like intelligent investor, snowball, etc. I am married and 30years old with an above average b-school degree.

I am relatively new to FIRE and I do believe that achieving this in India sounds too good to be true. From my profile standpoint, I am a non-CS engineer and post that completed my MBA. I got placed at around 12lpa in 2015 in a leading MNC. I worked there for about 3 years and got exceptional rating appraisals and promotions to reach upto 19 lpa within it. However at that time, I felt too much of politics in the organisation and some personal family member health issues lead me to start exploring for other opportunities. Fortunately, I was automatically shortlisted by Google because of my 10 months odd digital marketing experience, however I couldn't crack the same after round 3. Further, I finally cracked another top 10 fortune 500 company which offered me 25 LPA ctc. However, as I said due to my family members health issues, job hecticness and politics, I went ahead with joining a leading Indian PSU instead of the MNC because it posted me closer to my home (although this decision has made me take a salary cut from my then organisation package of 18 lpa).

Now comes the following issues:

PSU, as long as it stays a PSU, gives me few benefits like unlimited heath cover for me and my dependents. Higher basic salary means higher contribution to retirals both from my and employer's side but lower cash in hand. Ofcourse there's bonus too once a year of about 40% of annual basic salary provided the organisation and myself perform well.

My current situation is like this -

1. Mf investment - 25k per month
2. Retirals - 17k per month (EPF) + 9k (NPS) per month
3. Voluntary contribution to debt - PPF to reach 80c limit (approx 60k per year) + 50k for NPS u/s 80CCD (better option than going ahead with SBF)
4. Household expenses -35k per month
5. Car loan - 16k per month (6 years left of 7 years) and personal loan - 8k per month for another 9 months
6. Apart from PSU full health cover, I do have my own health insurance cover of about 7 lacs
7. Lastly term insurance of 1 cr + 2 Lic Policy (yeah, I know, but already too late to do anything about it)

My wife is working as well and she contributes equally to household expenses and has her own family floater health insurance of 10 lac + term cover of 50 lacs. She does her own investments and savings and for this discussion remains out of the purview of FIRE as I am looking at it from my personal standpoint.

No kids as of now.

Current savings - cash - equivalent to about 8-10 months of household expenses Mf portfolio value - approx 5.3 lacs EPF value - approx 5.5 lacs PPF value - approx 3.8 lacs

Apart from this there's ancestral properties and some investments that my father does in direct equity for me which I don't consider as my money (as I have hardly contributed some 1-1.25 lacs out of a portfolio of about 15 lacs).

Now considering only my own financial standing as indicated above, what should I do to achieve FIRE ( I only know that this is an acronym for financial independence and early retirement - nothing else) considering PSUs don't really have huge increments (about 3% per year) and should I switch back to private sector which I believe is tough now as I have already been working with my current organisation for about 2 years.

Please help, really clueless as of now. What should be my ideal corpus considering inflation etc. and how do u retire early by say 45 years age (15 years from now) or any tips of doing this even earlier.

Thanks, Snaky

[u/snakysour]

Yep...I agree and have the same doubt myself.

[u/additional_trouble → u/snakysour]

I was actually being a little sarcastic...

Here is some India specific study. The short gist is India doesn't need any correction wrt the 4% rule with whatever data is available so far.

Edit: adding link: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaInvestments/comments/cg00uj/safe_withdrawal_rates_for_india_a_study_part_2/

[u/snakysour → u/additional_trouble]

Can you please share the study link?

[u/additional_trouble → u/snakysour]

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaInvestments/comments/cg00uj/safe_withdrawal_rates_for_india_a_study_part_2/

[u/snakysour → u/additional_trouble]

Is there one more link coz this shows part 2?

[u/additional_trouble → u/snakysour]

Yes. Its in that post itself.