Monday, October 25, 2010

New Pension Scheme: Choose plan to suit risk profile







Under the New Pension Scheme (NPS), investors save money which is put into the capital market. The sum which you will get after retirement will be dependent on the performance of the capital market. You can make monthly or weekly contributions to the NPS. But for every contribution, your transaction cost will increase. 

Prior to NPS, there was the Defined Benefit Plan -one would get certain pension fixed for life. The postretirement proceeds were fixed and if there is a shortfall in this corpus, the government would make good. 

NPS is a Defined Contribution Plan where the returns will not be fixed. 

You will only get what you have contributed and returns that the fund manager generates on it. All new entrants to the central government services (other than armed forces) after January 1, 2004, will compulsorily join this scheme. 

All citizens, including NRIs, aged 18 to 60 can voluntary join the scheme. The exit age is 60 years. 

A minimum contribution of Rs 6,000 is compulsory per year. The minimum amount per contribution is Rs 500 and a minimum of four contributions in a year for each subscriber account is required. 

Under the NPS, each subscriber is allotted a unique 16-digit Permanent Retirement Account Number (PRAN). This number is portable. The records of transactions are maintained by the Central Record Keeping Agency (CRKA). The subscriber has the option to invest with seven pension fund managers (PFMs). He also has the option to choose any one or more PFMs to manage his contribution. These PFMs will have three kind of funds categorised as 'E' for equity funds, 'G' for funds investing in government securities and 'C' for fixed income securities other than government securities. 

There are two types of accounts: 

Tier I account where you cannot withdraw 

The Tier I account is the basic NPS account that is non-withdrawable till retirement or death of the subscriber. In this account, the total corpus at retirement age is split, where a minimum of 40 percent of the final corpus has to be compulsorily used to buy an annuity while the subscriber is free to withdraw the remaining 60 percent as a lump sum or in instalments. 

Tier II account where you can withdraw 

The Tier II account is available to only to those who are existing subscribers of the Tier I account. The money contributed into this account can be freely withdrawn as and when the subscriber wishes to except for a minimum balance that needs to be maintained at the end of each financial year. 

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