At 45, life often feels settled: a steady corporate role, a family of four, a home loan inching towards closure, and investments compounding quietly in the background.
For one mid-level executive earning a ₹50-lakh annual package, this stability looked assured. About 70% of his net worth was tied up in real estate—split between his family home and a second property on EMI. The rest sat in employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) holdings. He believed he had built resilience, until redundancy struck.
India’s biggest IT layoff
In July, one of India’s largest IT firms announced over 12,000 layoffs—around 2% of its global workforce—citing skill mismatches rather than AI as the cause. Mid and senior-level employees bore the brunt. It was the country’s largest-ever IT layoff, with ripple effects across the sector. Globally too, tech companies are struggling with cuts.
For our executive, the assumption of continuity until sixty collapsed overnight. Along with income, he lost the most precious resource in retirement planning: time. Mid-career redundancy is not just a financial shock; it is a career breakpoint. The decade from 45 to 55 is when professionals typically earn peak income, build surpluses, and lay retirement foundations. A disruption here compresses compounding and threatens critical goals: children’s higher education, home loan closure, and a dependable retirement corpus.
He now faced a 3-fold challenge: a disrupted career path, a destabilised financial journey, and an immediate lifestyle strain. What made things worse for him was the nature of his wealth: concentrated equity exposure tied up in ESOPs and more than half of his net wealth immobilised in property inaccessible in an emergency, with an ongoing EMI squeezing much of his cash flow. Worse, his role had become more about coordination than measurable contribution—making him vulnerable in a performance-driven corporate climate.
For many executives, the double bind of career fragility and financial fragility can be navigated with foresight. Building resilience means treating career adaptability and portfolio discipline as two sides of the same coin.
The three buckets of wealth
First, think of wealth in three buckets: safety, stability, and aspirations.
Safety is an emergency fund equal to six to twelve months of expenses held in highly liquid, low‑volatility assets, not at market risk; stability is built with moderate‑risk, income‑aligned holdings suited to your profile to preserve lifestyle; aspirations are growth assets such as diversified equities or international exposure that lift long‑term wealth mobility.
This structure ensures that a temporary stoppage doesn’t force tapping into long‑term retirement funds.
Asset allocation first
Asset allocation—not stock picking—drives portfolio performance. A 70:30 debt-equity or income-growth split would have given our executive more resilience than his real-estate-heavy model. Also beware overlap: multiple funds or properties don’t equal diversification if they move together. True diversification works only when assets behave differently.
Investor behaviour
Investor behaviour remains the Achilles heel. Individuals usually underperform their own investment by mistiming markets, buying in highs, and panicking in lows.
Studies show the gap between investment return and investor return can amount to 1‑2% annually. Disciplined regular investing, periodic review, and resisting emotional withdrawals are the tools that preserve retirement corpus.
Career insurance
Parallel to financial work runs career work. Reskilling is no longer optional; it is insurance against irrelevance. Mid-career professionals must move beyond coordination into measurable outcomes, building expertise in digital tools, data-driven decisions, or emerging sectors. A career that adapts prolongs income streams, and enduring income allows portfolios to compound uninterrupted.
Closing reality
Redundancy at 45 does not have to spell derailment. It is a detour, sharp, unsettling, but navigable. For professionals who build buffers, balance growth with safety, and align wealth with goals, a job loss becomes a pause rather than a collapse.
As Warren Buffett once observed, “The best protection against inflation is your own earning power. The best investment you can make is in yourself.”
That wisdom extends to redundancy too. Retirement security rests not on avoiding shocks but on preparing for them, through portfolios that can bend without breaking and careers that can evolve without ending.
Tarun Birani, founder and CEO, TBNG Capital Advisors
