Retirement Planning: How to choose allocation towards schemes E/G/C in NPS?

Most Indians still look at the National Pension System as a tool to save some extra tax. NPS Subscribers have four asset classes to choose from: Equities – This is where the money is invested in equity markets via stocks or equity-related instruments of companies listed in India. So your decision on NPS asset allocation should be taken after giving cognizance to the existing allocation of retirement-earmarked instruments like EPF, PPF and equity funds. If NPS is one of the products you use for retirement savings, then your NPS asset allocation should have a high allocation to equity or Scheme E. If you aren’t exactly young and say have about 10 years left for retirement, but you also have a large allocation to debt savings, then you can have a high equity allocation in NPS via scheme E. If you have been using equity funds primarily for retirement, then obviously your equity allocation is already very high. And if your EPF corpus isn’t big, then you can treat NPS as part of the debt side of retirement corpus and give higher weightage to Schemes G and C. So if I have to summaries this discussion, then it is that NPS asset allocation should be decided on the basis of what is the allocation of the remaining retirement portfolio that you have.