How much you may get to save?

In any case, salaried taxpayers with income of about Rs 6,00,000 may not have more than Rs 60,000-70,000 to invest. But even Rs 60,000 invested every year for 20 years can grow to about Rs 34 lakh if the rate of return were about 9 per cent per annum.

This Rs 34 lakh will be apart from the corpus of provident funds, super-annuation and the value of your housing property. That should be enough to take care of most of your needs post-retirement.

So, how should the Rs 60,000 be invested? Typically, if you have a super-annuation policy and it invests mainly in debt instruments, you should use the limit under Section 80C mainly for equity-oriented tax-saving instruments, such as tax-saving equity funds and pension plans.