Retirement Planner

Plan your savings to achieve your retirement goals

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Overview: Estimates the total savings corpus you'll need at retirement to sustain your lifestyle for 25 years, factoring in inflation. It then shows whether your current savings will reach that goal, or how much more you need to save monthly.
Best for: Long-term financial planning — understanding if you're saving enough, or how much to increase your monthly savings to retire comfortably.

Current Age

Years

Retirement Age

Years

Monthly Expenses (Current)

Current Savings

Expected Return Rate

Inflation Rate

Corpus Needed $0

Monthly Saving Needed $0

Your Savings Will Grow To $0

Gap / Surplus $0

Savings Projection

🎥 How It Works

How to use the Retirement Planner

This planner answers two of the hardest questions in personal finance: how much will I need to retire? and how much do I need to save every month to get there? It factors in inflation so that today’s comfortable lifestyle still feels comfortable decades from now.

Step by step

Current age and retirement age — determines your accumulation window.
Expected lifespan — typically plan to age 85 or 90 to be safe.
Monthly expenses today — the lifestyle you want to maintain, in today’s money.
Inflation rate — historical averages are 3–6% depending on country.
Pre-retirement return — what your portfolio earns while you’re still working (stocks-heavy, typically higher).
Post-retirement return — what you earn after retiring (more bonds, typically lower).
Current savings — anything already set aside for retirement.

The tool shows the retirement corpus you need, the monthly SIP needed to reach it, and how much of the gap your existing savings already close.

Why it’s important

Retirement targets are counter-intuitive because of inflation. $5,000/month today may require a nominal $12,000/month in 25 years at 4% inflation. Not planning for that gap is how people end up forced to work long past the age they wanted to stop.

Worked examples

Example 1 — Starting at 30. You’re 30, want to retire at 60, and need $5,000/month (today’s money) until age 85. At 4% inflation and 10% pre-retirement, 6% post, you’ll need roughly $2.9M at retirement. Saving ~$1,200/month starting now gets you there.

Example 2 — Starting at 40. Same targets, but you start ten years later. The required monthly contribution more than doubles — roughly $2,900/month — because you’ve lost a decade of compounding.

Example 3 — A lower-expense lifestyle. If $3,000/month is enough, your target corpus drops proportionally, and the monthly savings needed drops too. Moving somewhere cheaper is, mathematically, one of the most powerful retirement levers.

Re-run the planner every year as your income, expenses, and savings change.

Real-life scenario: starting at 25 vs. 40, and FIRE

Consider two colleagues. Anil starts a ₹15,000 per month retirement SIP at age 25; Ramesh starts ₹30,000 per month at age 40. Both retire at 60. Assuming a 10% return, Anil ends with about ₹5.75 crore while Ramesh finishes with around ₹1.6 crore — despite contributing twice as much every month. The retirement planner makes this counter-intuitive math instantly clear: starting early is roughly four times more powerful than doubling the contribution later.

A second scenario: FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) enthusiasts who plan to stop working at 45 can use the planner to see exactly how aggressive the monthly savings rate must be to cover a 45-year retirement at today’s expenses, then test lifestyle-inflation assumptions to understand the real target.

How the math works: corpus target and required contribution

Retirement planning has two linked steps.

1. Target corpus. The 4% rule estimates the corpus you need as annual expenses × 25:

Corpus ≈ Annual expenses in retirement × 25

To project today’s expenses forward, inflate them: future expenses = today’s expenses × (1 + inflation)^years.

2. Required monthly SIP. Given a target corpus, a monthly rate i, and n months until retirement, invert the annuity future-value formula to solve for PMT:

PMT = FV × i / ((1 + i)ⁿ − 1)

Worked example. A 30-year-old retiring at 60 spends ₹60,000/month today and wants to sustain that lifestyle. At 6% inflation the same lifestyle in 30 years costs ₹60,000 × (1.06)³⁰ ≈ ₹3.45 lakh/month, or ₹41.4 lakh/year. Target corpus ≈ ₹41.4 lakh × 25 = ₹10.35 crore. To hit that with a 10% annual return SIP over 360 months, required PMT ≈ ₹45,800/month. Start at 40 instead of 30 and the required contribution jumps to about ₹1.65 lakh/month — a vivid illustration of why the first ten years of earning are the most financially valuable.

The planner also supports a FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) mode that extends the drawdown horizon and uses a more conservative 3.25-3.5% safe withdrawal rate, because a longer retirement leaves less room for poor early-year sequences.

Frequently asked questions

Is the 4% rule safe for Indian investors?

The original 4% rule is based on US 30-year retirement windows. For India, most planners use 3-3.5% because equity/debt mixes are different and inflation volatility is higher. When in doubt, aim for a larger corpus — it costs relatively little extra per month and provides real resilience.

Should I count EPF, PPF, and NPS in the corpus?

Yes, but separately. EPF and PPF behave like bond-heavy accounts with tax benefits; NPS is a hybrid with equity exposure. Estimate each pot’s terminal value at retirement and subtract from the target corpus — the calculator’s “required SIP” output should cover only the shortfall.

What inflation rate should I use?

5-6% is a defensible long-run figure for India; 2.5-3% for the US. The plan is most sensitive to this input — a 1 percentage-point change in assumed inflation can move the corpus target by 20-30%. Always rerun with at least one stress-test inflation value.

Do I need to adjust for healthcare costs separately?

Yes. Medical inflation typically runs 2-3 points above general inflation. A common adjustment is to assume healthcare costs rise at 10% annually and allocate an extra 15-20% on top of the baseline corpus for post-65 healthcare, especially in markets without universal coverage.