Warren Buffett: Investing retirement savings in zero-risk products is a terrible idea

Whenever I write or speak about retirement savings, I’m always stunned by the volume and nature of the responses I get. More and more people are worried about how they will make ends meet after retirement. With falling interest rates, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon.

In the words of a Wall Streeter as quoted by Warren Buffett, “Those who’re looking for risk-free returns are more likely to find returns-free risk.” While the original statement was intended for US bond investors, it’s even more true of Indian retirees, or potential retirees. It is a deep belief amongst Indian savers, investors and investment advisers that retirement savings should be invested with the lowest risk possible. In the abstract, this is an excellent urge to have, and one could hardly disagree with it. However, in practice, the impact of this obsession with zero-risk is terrible. The reason for that is that everyone ignores the risk posed by the biggest threat to your financial well being, which is inflation. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but if you ignore the effects of inflation on your retirement savings, then you are heading for old-age poverty.

The normal Indian way of thinking about retirement investing is that one must not tolerate even the minutest drop in the nominal value of one’s investment, all the while ignoring that inflation is constantly reducing its real value by anything ranging from 5-12% a year. There are a lucky few who have some sort of an inherently inflationproof source of income—like property which fetches good rent. Everyone else must fight a lifelong battle against this relentless financial enemy.

The risk that people talk about is based on a casual impression of volatility. Equities may be volatile, but for any investment over a few years, the volatility gets more than compensated for by returns. For a long-term investment, short-term volatility is not of concern. Take the example of the decade gone by. A typical fixed income option would have yielded a return of a little more than 8%. An investment of Rs 10,000 a month would have grown to about Rs 18-19 lakh. Over the same period, an average (far from the best) equity fund would have grown to Rs 25 lakh, a return of about 14%. Extend this kind of a differential over three decades and the equity option would generate about 2.5 to 3 times what the fixed income option would generate.

Please read that again. This kind of a difference between returns would make the difference between a saver starting retired life in prosperity versus always struggling to make ends meet. The thing to realise is that saving for retirement is a long-term goal. There is no earthly reason to think of it differently from any other investment in the same time range.

Actually, the time horizon of retirement savings is even longer than we generally suppose. People take the date of retire ment as the target date of the investment. However, retirement may be an event in your life, but from a savings and investment perspective, it is not an event but the beginning of a long stretch of retired life. At the age of 55, you may think that retirement is just a decade away so your retirement kitty should be in ‘non-risky’ investments, but actually that doesn’t make any sense. You will be using the earnings from these investments when you are 65, 75, 85 or 95 years old. Retirement can be a very long time. The years from 60 to the end of a full life can be as long as 30 or 35 years. That’s as much as your working life. In those 30 or 35 years, prices would again multiply five to seven times, maybe more. Worse, you’re likely to face unpredictable and growing medical bills, which is a major component of real inflation that people face in their lives.

Savers who want to successfully provide for their old age must think through these issues clearly and abandon the trap that conventional thinking leads them into.

(The writer is CEO, Value Research)