A SWP option is more tax efficient

Systematic investment plans (SIPs) need no introduction, given the popularity of their appeal. It is the systematic withdrawal plans (SWPs) that often do not garner the attention they deserve despite their extensive role in holistic financial planning, especially during the distribution phase of one's funds in his/her portfolio.

Retired people often, quite judiciously, put all their life's earnings into debt funds and other fixed income instruments. They also need regular income to provide for their daily needs. One of the primary challenges faced by them is ensuring tax efficiency as far as investments are concerned.

One difficulty that many retirees encounter is the selection of appropriate investment options to deploy their retirement funds. For salaried individuals, the total cash inflow at the time of retirement generally runs into lakhs of rupees.

This can be in the varied forms of provident fund, pension, superannuation, gratuity, leave encashment, etc. Usually, money also pours in from long term investments like public provident fund (PPF) and insurance policies whose maturity concur with the time of retirement.

The optimum deployment of such massive funds has to be done in a manner which would ensure a constant pouring of tax-efficient income in the absence of any salary or business income to meet dayto-day expenses for lifetime. In such situations, an SWP can come in handy as this is seen to be the most suitable option to plan for a tax-efficient monthly inflow for retired people.

An SWP option is set up in a corpus, mentioning the amount of monthly withdrawal needed and the duration of need for the monthly withdrawals. Since the withdrawal is made every month/quarter, it results in the sale of a certain number of units. This would create an incidence of capital gains tax due to the withdrawal made. Withdrawals made before one year lead to short term capital gains tax according to the tax slab for debt instruments and 15% plus surcharge capital gains tax on equity instruments. The illustration given here shows how this option can be utilized in a fund.

For example on January 1, 2013, you invest Rs 60 lakh in a debt fund at an NAV of Rs 10. You require a fixed monthly income of Rs 50,000 or Rs 6 lakh per annum (for the purpose of simplicity we are not assuming the monthly income increases by inflation each year, in the given illustration). The withdrawal made per month results in the sale of some units every month.

If the per unit price has increased by 10% at the end of year one (that is Rs 10 has moved to Rs 11 and your average selling price for each withdrawal made in the year was Rs 10.50), in the whole year you would have sold 57,144 units (Rs 6 lakh/10.50).

So capital gain is Rs 28,572 (0.50 per unit x 57,144 units) and the capital gains tax is Rs 5,714 (assuming a tax bracket of 20%). Your total withdrawals made were Rs 6 lakh and you have paid a tax of Rs 5,714 only for the whole first year.

This rate will further reduce after one year when the long term capital gains tax on equity falls to nil and on debt at 10% flat or 20% after indexation (WIL) and you have to pay tax of Rs 2,857 only for the whole second year onwards.