The most crucial support retirement planning as a goal gives anyone is rarely obvious at the first glance, and the emotional and psychological implications of avoiding retirement planning are hardly visible to any. Those who have never thought about retirement planning or spoken about it to their friends or family may miss the broader aspect of how important it is. Retirement planning has been an ideology for many generations. I prefer to think of it in simpler terms which is necessary: Retirement planning is at bottom of any need Pyramid. I wanted to go deeper on this, but ultimately I believe it will be well understood with a straight and direct comparison with birds and their way of living. This is how I came up with this article.

Throughout this article, I have come up with real-life scenarios of the hardship, pre-planning, and security in a bird’s life and then drew parallels to the lessons it teaches us throughout our life. We hardly might have thought that birds can also teach us about retirement planning.

Learning retirement planning from birds:

Post anticipation plan

The first trait that will be relevant to learn from birds in regards to retirement planning would post anticipation plan. For example with respect to our weather, we experience different kinds of seasons. Let's say monsoon season, don't we experience a wide range of
weather from the passing shower to heavy rainfall?

Let’s assume rains as retirement and sunny days as earlier days of earning. So the retirement age can be anywhere from 40 years to 70
years.

Now, what does a bird do in their retirement (i.e Monsoon season) to protect its family? Birds start building their nest well before retirement. The parent bird starts finding different things needed to build its corpus nest. Like twigs, weeds, dry dung, leaves, grass, feathers, moss, & many other things.

Being humans luckily we have certain advantages when we plan for our retirement –

• We can plan our retirement between 40 to 70 years of age depending on how prepared we are.
• To plan we need to build our nest (Corpus) which consists of different assets like Equity, Gold, EPF, Real Estate, Mutual funds,
  Bonds, and many more.

Early adoption
The protection period for birds in a year is usually 4 to 4.5 months i.e close to 40% of the time in a year they are protected from the unpredictability of the weather. This is somewhere very close to the human lifecycle. Assuming a human lifespan of 90 years, the latter 30-35 years are spent with loved ones, reaping the fruits of efforts that were put in the initial phase of life. Just like different seasons throughout the year, each human development stage has its own importance.

For a better understanding of the above analogy let’s take an example. Birds start preparing their nest at the beginning of the spring i.e February and it usually takes 2 to 3 months for preparing their nest.

In a similar manner, we need to learn from birds that, to build a sustainable nest i.e corpus we need to start building it right from our Adulthood stage of life. The benefits would definitely come with time, but gradually you are building yourself a good cushion to fall back. We all might feel the need to ask how can we do that.

• Collecting small twigs (Equity)
• Feather (PPF)
• Weeds (SIP)
• Dry Dung (Real Estate)
• Other assets to build a beautiful nest

We need to make sure that our family, loved ones, and ourselves need to feel secure and protected from all sorts of bad weather and storms of life just like how a bird tried throughout his life to keep his little ones shielded.

“ Giving attention and time on time is the only definitive guide for retirement planning” – By Prasad Shetty.