Retirement Calculator

It inflates your current monthly expenses forward to the year you retire, multiplies that figure by twelve, and multiplies again by the number of years between retirement and life expectancy. The retirement-year expense is then held flat across those years rather than inflated further, which is how most retail calculators in India present it.

Holding it flat assumes the return on what is left roughly covers inflation after you stop working, so the two cancel. It keeps the headline number comparable with other calculators. It also means the figure is a planning anchor rather than a guarantee — the SWP calculator is where the same corpus gets drawn down month by month with a real return and a real step-up.

India’s headline CPI has spent most of the last decade between 4 and 6 per cent, and the Reserve Bank targets 4 with a two-point band either side. Household inflation is not the headline number though: school fees, domestic help and medical costs have run well above it, while electronics and telecom have run below. The slider is there because the answer moves a lot with this input.

Two multipliers compound on it. Expenses inflate for every year until you retire, and then the inflated figure is paid for every year of a retirement that may run thirty years or more. At 6 per cent inflation, an expense doubles in about twelve years, so retiring twenty-four years out means starting from roughly four times today’s number.

Only if you include them in Current Savings. That field is treated as one lump sum growing at the expected return until retirement, so a provident fund balance can go in, but its own contribution schedule and its own interest rate are not modelled separately.

It is a flat instalment — the same rupee amount every month until retirement, so what it buys shrinks a little each year. It does not step up with your salary. If you expect to raise the contribution each year, the SIP and Lumpsum calculator has a step-up field, and a rising instalment reaches the same target with a smaller starting amount.

The default sits at the app-wide assumption for a long-horizon equity-oriented portfolio. What matters more than the exact figure is that the same rate is doing two jobs here: growing your existing savings and growing every future instalment. Moving it a single point changes the required SIP noticeably, which is worth seeing before you settle on one.

No. The corpus figure is pre-tax. Equity mutual fund gains are taxed when units are redeemed, not while they grow, so the drawdown is where tax actually lands. The SWP calculator prices that side — FIFO lots, the yearly long-term exemption and the short-term rate.

There is no separate field for it. The usual way to reflect it here is to reduce Current Monthly Expenses by whatever that income covers, so the corpus only has to fund the gap. Doing it that way keeps the income inflating at the same rate as the expense it offsets, which may or may not match a fixed pension.

Planning tends to run past the average rather than to it, since the risk of outliving the money is what the number guards against. The slider lets you see the cost of each extra year directly: because the corpus is a straight multiplication by years in retirement, adding five years adds a fixed slice of corpus rather than a compounding one.

It is the required corpus minus whatever your current savings will have grown to by retirement. That remainder is what the monthly SIP has to build. If your existing savings already outgrow the target, the remainder is zero and no further SIP is implied.

Yes, and that is the intended route. The retirement page hands its corpus to the SWP calculator through a link, where the same figure is drawn down monthly against real historical index returns instead of a flat assumption. A corpus that clears this page can still run dry there if the weak years arrive first.

The mechanics are the same — set a lower retirement age and the two multipliers move in opposite directions. Fewer years to save means less compounding and a higher required SIP, while more years in retirement means a larger corpus. Early retirement is where the corpus figure grows fastest for a small change in the age.

No. They sit inside whatever you enter as monthly expenses and inflate at the same rate as everything else. Medical inflation in India has generally run above headline CPI, so a plan built on a single blended rate is carrying that difference silently.