Introducing the Retirement Calculator — Find Your Corpus & Monthly Savings Target

Retirement is the largest financial goal most people will ever have — and one of the least planned for. Unlike a home loan or a car purchase, there is no bank telling you the required monthly payment. The Retirement Calculator changes that: enter your age, expenses, and return assumptions and get a clear answer in seconds.

What the tool calculates

The calculator uses a PV-annuity model rather than a fixed 4% rule, which means it adapts to your specific post-retirement return and expected lifespan rather than applying a US-market-derived rule to an Indian context.

Enter once, see everything:

• Required corpus — the amount you need at retirement to sustain your lifestyle for your expected post-retirement years, modelled as a present value annuity
• Projected corpus — what your current savings and monthly SIP will actually grow to by your retirement date
• Shortfall or surplus — the gap between required and projected, clearly labelled
• Additional monthly savings needed — the precise monthly top-up to close any shortfall, derived from the inverted SIP formula
• Savings milestone table — your projected vs required corpus at every 5-year interval from today to retirement, so you can track progress along the way

Why the annuity model rather than the 4% rule?

The 4% rule is a useful shorthand but has two problems in the Indian context: it was derived from US market data over specific historical periods, and it does not account for your specific post-retirement return or your actual life expectancy. The annuity model computes the corpus you need to make a specific annual payment, at your specific post-retirement return rate, for a specific number of years. If you plan to retire at 55 and live to 90, that is 35 post-retirement years. If you plan to retire at 65 and expect 15 years in retirement, the required corpus is very different. The tool handles both correctly.

Inputs that matter

Most retirement calculators ask only for monthly expenses and return rate. This tool asks for:

• Current savings (EPF + PPF + NPS + mutual funds earmarked for retirement)
• Monthly savings/SIP (your actual ongoing contributions)
• Life expectancy (the planning horizon)
• Both pre-retirement and post-retirement return assumptions (these are genuinely different: equity-heavy pre-retirement vs income-heavy post-retirement)
• Inflation rate (affects both the corpus size needed and the milestone projections)

The separation of current savings and monthly savings is important: a ₹50 lakh corpus today growing at 12% for 30 years contributes roughly ₹1.5 crore to the final corpus, completely separately from whatever SIP you run in parallel. Both are tracked and shown individually.

How to use it for FIRE planning

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) planning in India is increasingly popular. To use this calculator for FIRE, simply enter your actual target retirement age — 40, 45, or 50 — and your expected lifespan. The calculator will show the corpus needed, the monthly savings required, and whether your current trajectory gets you there. The milestone table is particularly useful for FIRE: it shows whether you are on track at each 5-year checkpoint, not just at the final destination.

For a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts — EPF and NPS contribution strategy, asset allocation, sequence-of-returns risk, and SWP planning — read our retirement planning guide for India.

Free, private, and always will be

The Retirement Calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to any server or stored anywhere. A future Pro tier is planned for saving multiple scenarios, FIRE mode, and PDF export of a full retirement plan — but the core calculation stays free forever.