What is a Glide Path?
Background
A glide path is a predetermined schedule for shifting your portfolio from higher-risk assets (equity) to lower-risk ones (debt) as you age or move closer to retirement, rather than deciding your allocation fresh every year. The term is borrowed from aviation — a smooth, planned descent rather than a sudden drop.
Explanation
You already have a live example of this if you use NPS: its "auto choice" option comes with three built-in glide paths — LC75 (aggressive, starts at 75% equity), LC50 (moderate, starts at 50%), and LC25 (conservative, starts at 25%) — each of which automatically reduces your equity allocation by a fixed percentage every year after age 35, reaching a low, stable equity floor by 55. Outside NPS, you can build the same idea manually: pick a target equity percentage for today and a lower one for your retirement date, then reduce equity by a couple of percentage points each year (redirecting new contributions to debt, or rebalancing existing holdings) rather than making one large switch right before retiring. The point isn't to avoid equity — it's to avoid being 70% equity in the single worst year to retire.
Example
From age 45 to 60, moving from 70% equity to 40% equity by trimming roughly 2 percentage points a year (redirecting new SIP contributions to debt funds rather than selling equity, which avoids triggering capital gains along the way) gets you to a materially safer allocation exactly when a market crash would hurt most — right before or right after you start withdrawing. This directly reduces sequence-of-returns risk: the same average return over 30 years can produce very different outcomes depending on whether the bad years land at the start or the end of retirement, and a glide path is the main lever you control for reducing that risk. See asset allocation for how to set your starting and ending mix.
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