Start With Your Monthly Expenses
Retirement planning starts with today's monthly expenses. List everything — housing, food, health, travel, and leisure. Most people underestimate by 20–30%, so add a buffer.
Assume you'll need roughly the same lifestyle in retirement, but remember that some costs (like commuting) fall while others (like healthcare) rise sharply with age.
Inflate Your Expenses to Retirement Age
If your monthly expenses are ₹50,000 today and you retire in 25 years at 6% inflation, you'll need about ₹2,14,600 per month at retirement just to maintain the same lifestyle.
Multiply that by the number of years you expect to live in retirement — typically 25–30 years after retiring at 60. This gives you the total future-rupee requirement.
The 4% Rule and Safe Withdrawal
A common rule of thumb: your corpus should be about 25 times your annual expenses at retirement, and you can safely withdraw 4% per year without running out over 30 years.
For ₹25 lakh annual expenses, that means a corpus of about ₹6.25 crore. In India, with higher inflation and healthcare costs, many planners recommend a more conservative 3–3.5% withdrawal rate.
Build the Corpus Step by Step
Combine your EPF, PPF, NPS, and equity investments. A monthly SIP of ₹25,000 at 12% for 25 years grows to about ₹4.2 crore — a strong start toward the target.
Use our Retirement calculator to compute your required corpus and monthly savings, our PPF calculator for the guaranteed portion, and a SIP calculator to plan the equity part.