Retiring Twice: What 39 Years in Finance Taught Me About Planning for Life After Work

I retired from banking in 2017, at the Chief Manager grade, after thirty-nine years that took me from an entry-level assistant to Branch Head at cities across India, and eventually to Business Banking Credit Head. Most people who've spent decades in one institution imagine retirement as a single, clean line — one day you're working, the next you're not. I've now lived through what actually happens after that line, and it rarely looks the way people expect.

What banking teaches you about retirement — that most people never see

Spending decades inside a bank means watching thousands of other people's retirements up close — pension structures, provident funds, the ones who planned well and the ones who assumed a lump sum would simply last. That vantage point teaches you something people outside banking rarely get to see directly: retirement isn't a number you reach, it's an income structure you have to actively design, well before the day you stop earning a salary.

The second act nobody plans for

I didn't expect to start a new, active chapter after retiring. But I'd become an AMFI-certified Mutual Fund Distributor while still at the bank, and eight years on, that's become a genuine second career — working directly with individuals and families, now as HCS Finserv, in Bangalore rather than the cities I'd spent my career in. Retirement, for me, wasn't an ending. It was a transition I hadn't fully planned for, and I got lucky that it worked out. Most people don't leave that to luck, and they shouldn't have to.

What most people get wrong about planning for it

The biggest mistake I see isn't under-saving — plenty of people save diligently. It's treating retirement as a single cliff-edge event rather than a multi-decade phase that itself needs planning: how income gets drawn down, how it's structured across different needs, and how it adapts as circumstances change after the last salary has already stopped arriving. Planning doesn't end at retirement — in many ways, that's when the real planning starts.

A personal note

Thirty-nine years in finance didn't just teach me products and processes. It taught me that the number on a retirement calculator is the easy part. The harder part — the part I now spend most of my time on — is helping people think clearly about what comes after, before they're standing at that edge themselves.