If your company offered your full salary every month and told you to manage your taxes and deduction all by yourself, what would you do?

[heislove1980]

Setting up the experiment:let's take an arbitrary amount of 20 L per annum for easy calculation but also neither too high or too low. 20 LPA is around 1.7 LPM (let's take 50k for household, 20K savings) that leaves a nice 1LPM. To simplify further and to get maximum value out of the answers, let's say you are starting fresh with 0. No money in bank, no assets nothing, not even insurance. but this can be realistic for a very young 22 yo person, so let's have less time by making our guy 30 (he spent ALL his 20's meditating in a cave) as for his source of income, let's say he has a decent job, but not too decent either, (i started with him as your typical software dev, but i felt growth was too steep for experiment, then i went for graphic designer, but it was too slow to pickup from the trends i researched, so i decided it to be something in between, so our guy is now a uiux designer), so the career is uiux design. Now keeping all this in mind, his type of career ( you can choose anything that has average steady growth), his limited time and age (and its effects) and energy and no safety net. I earlier had him with a house, but that would remove rent from equation, so I have made him both a renter and an orphan or let's add couple of dependents, an old grandpa who can't work and has no money and a young grandson who also has no money, both have a risk factor of potential illnesses attached to them, no spouse, siblings, parents, friends, relatives for additional income, he is the single source of money here and also he can't live in a small toilet sized room, he has to rent a proper 2bhk house, 1 room for grandpa, 1 room for grandson and our guy sleeps in the dog house. He is also a redditor, so there is potential health risks due to obesity, keep that in mind as well.

Target:

a. What would you do to pay least amount of taxes? (or no taxes at all - no illegal, everything has to be legal)

b. What would you do to create a secure life?

c. What is the path you'd take to live the most comfortable and settled life?

d. How would you plan your life to achieve the best quality of life possible?

e. What would you do to make this person FIRE by the age of 45?

Answer as many questions as you can to the best of your abilities.

Let's see who comes up with the best answers.

Irrelevant context: This question popped into my mind when a colleague was cribbing about all the deductions and was harping about how he'd do so many things if only the company just gave all his money to him, so then i took that and built this challenge/puzzle out of it. There are always people coming here with their specific problems, but this is your chance to run wild. All the best.

 

[xsmbchunhat]

@heislove1980 r/oddlyspecific

 

[eberzas]

@heislove1980 On the basis of your assumptions:

Response to a: I would assume Sec 192 of IT Act (TDS on Salaries) is no longer relevant in this hypothetical world and therefore would treat the money I recieve as consulting income. Not wanting to take the burden of computing tax liability each quarter and requirement of maintainence of accounts, I would use new tax regime and presumptive tax @burning___bush 44ADA showing 50% of reciepts as income and net tax would only be around Rs. 65000.

I might further take a liberal interpretation that the graphic design contracts are not covered under 44ADA and therefore profit under 44AD can be declared at 6% on reciepts leading to no tax.

In the absence of an employment agreement (OP has assumed so much, I can assume at least this!), a contractor does not recieve salary but fees for contract. Therefore, he may file on either of these basis and save tax.

Response to b: Create an emergency fund of 6 months expenses, term life insurance for self to cover dependents in event of absence and medical insurance for self and dependents first and foremost. Then save as much as possible towards building corpus for retirement, education, children and such other goals one may have.

Response to c and d: I feel a comfortable life can be lived on half of the income of Rs. 20 lakhs and the remaining half can be saved and invested into debt (25%), equity mutual funds (50%), gold (20%) and cash (5%). I feel that Rs. 10 lakhs is sufficient for a comfortable life for the dependents and self assumed in the question.

Response to e: Assuming Rs. 10 lakh gets saved over 15 years (30-45), Rs. 150 lakhs is saved. (I am omitting inflation for this calculation but only considering real returns for mutual funds. Likewise also omitting non-promotional salary growth assuming that to be equivalent to inflation). Let us also assume a 20% hike because of promotion at 35 and 40 and whatever gets earned there is also saved. So net savings will be 150+(4*5)+(9*5)=215 lakhs.

Assuming SWP @ say 4%, Rs. 8.60 lakhs can be generated per year. But definitely at least 2% real growth would have been reflected in the portoflio over the years. So, considering that @ 4%, the monthly expenditure of Rs. 10 lakhs would be fully recovered and FIRE Achieved.

(Note: All calculations are subject to assumptions above. Worked in pure hypothetical model assuming no new variables such as additional dependents, marriages, emergencies etc and that Rs. 10 lakhs would be sufficient expenditure).