Retirement Planning Is Too Human A Problem To Leave To An Algorithm

Most people spend decades building wealth and very little time thinking about what happens to it after they stop working. The questions around retirement, how long it needs to last, how much is enough, and who should be trusted to manage it, have never been more complex or more consequential. Jai Bajaj, Founder and CEO of RTR, incubated by Bajaj Capital, has spent years sitting across from clients at every life stage, asking exactly those questions. His answers, shaped by six decades of his family’s legacy in financial planning, are refreshingly direct.

Q ) On AI versus human empathy

AI has raised the average level of investor awareness considerably. But there is a fundamental question it cannot answer: can you truly trust advice from something that cannot be held accountable for it? We are talking about a person’s life savings.

What often goes unrecognised is the quiet reassurance a good advisor provides. The confidence of knowing that an expert is genuinely across your needs, tracking your goals, and thinking about your future. AI tends to produce the opposite effect. It surfaces an excess of options and leaves the user to make sense of them alone.

My grandfather built this business on trust. Sixty years later, that remains unchanged. Proper financial planning requires understanding the person sitting across from you: their goals, their fears, their unspoken anxieties. These are things that cannot be neatly compressed into a prompt. The last mile of planning is deeply human and always will be.

Q ) On longevity risk

Every plan on our platform assumes a life expectancy of 100 years. Not because we expect every client to live that long, but because the corpus must outlive the client, never the other way around. A defined portion is allocated to market-linked assets, reviewed and rebalanced regularly to ensure growth without exposing the retirement corpus to undue risk.

Some clients push back and ask us to assume a shorter life expectancy. We politely decline. That is a risk we are simply not willing to take on their behalf.

Q ) On inflation

Thumb rules are useful for building basic comprehension. They do not deliver precise outcomes. We apply different inflation rates to different goals. Health inflation, fuel inflation and lifestyle inflation are each treated separately, because they behave differently and matter differently at different life stages. Where clients demand that level of detail, we build it into every plan.

Q ) On the decumulation gap

The first challenge here is not financial at all. The shift from structured workweeks to open-ended retirement catches many people completely off guard. My father’s extensive research into centenarians showed that finding genuine purpose in this new chapter is the most critical layer of retirement planning, one that goes far beyond corpus size or withdrawal rates.

At RTR, we address this directly. Our plans include a clear post-retirement cash flow view, with the corpus spread across suitable investment avenues to ensure regular income throughout retirement.

Q ) On why retirement planning matters at every age

Retirement is the only financial goal that is entirely selfish. As life progresses, commitments multiply and the ability to prioritise oneself quietly shrinks. Starting early changes that equation dramatically.

Rs 5,000 invested every month from age 25 builds a larger corpus than Rs 20,000 invested every month from age 35. Compounding needs time above everything else. There is no perfect age to begin. The age you start is always the right one.

Disclaimer: The Views are Personal and not a part of the Outlook Money Editorial Feature