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Retirement Calculator

What your household spends today, carried forward to the year you stop working, and what funding that would take from now. Your assumptions, not ours.

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What you would still spend after retiring, in today's money.
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Usually lower, because a drawdown corpus is held more conservatively.
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PF, NPS and anything else earmarked for this.
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Please read this. Every figure here follows from assumptions you supplied. Returns are market-linked, arrive unevenly, and are promised by nobody. The corpus figure ignores tax, exit load and any pension you may receive, and it assumes expenses rise smoothly, which real life does not. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) and not an investment adviser.

Why there are two return rates

Almost every retirement calculator online uses one rate for the whole life of the plan, and that quietly overstates what is realistic. The money is doing two different jobs.

While you are building the corpus, the horizon is long and a poor stretch can be waited out. Once you are drawing a monthly amount from it, every bad month sells units at lower values, and that damage compounds against you rather than for you. Most households hold the drawdown corpus more conservatively for exactly that reason, which means a lower expected return in the second stage.

Using one optimistic rate across both stages produces a smaller corpus requirement and a comfortable-looking instalment. It is the most common way these calculations flatter people.

What this calculation deliberately leaves out

  • Any pension. If you will receive one, the corpus needed is lower, and our page on running a plan on pension income deals with that case.
  • Tax on withdrawals, which our page on mutual fund taxation explains structurally.
  • Lumpy costs. A medical event, a child's wedding, a house repair. Real retirements are not a smooth monthly line.
  • The sequence of returns, which matters enormously once you are withdrawing and which no single-rate model can show.

Because of that last point especially, treat the corpus figure as a floor to aim at rather than a target to just reach.

If the number looks impossible

It often does at first, particularly for anybody starting in their forties, and the honest response is not a cleverer assumption. It is to move one of the real levers.

Retiring later shortens the drawdown and lengthens the building period at the same time, which is why it moves the number more than anything else. A step-up on the instalment lowers what you need to commit today. Working part-time in the first few retirement years reduces the corpus that has to carry the earliest and most damaging period. And planning for genuinely lower expenses is a legitimate answer rather than a defeat.

What does not work is raising the return assumption until the number looks comfortable. That does not change what you will have; it changes what the screen says.

Where to go from here

Build the emergency buffer before increasing any instalment, as our page on building an emergency fund sets out. Raise the instalment with your income rather than on a date you have to remember, using the mechanics on our step-up SIP page. And when the drawdown eventually begins, the mechanism is a Systematic Withdrawal Plan rather than repeated manual redemptions, which you can model on the SWP calculator.

If you would like this worked through against your actual position rather than a set of round numbers, get in touch. That conversation costs nothing.

Retirement Calculator — Frequently Asked Questions

There is no single figure, because it depends on your own monthly expenses, how long the money must last, and what you assume about inflation and returns. This calculator takes those four inputs from you and works out the corpus they imply, which is a requirement under your assumptions rather than a recommendation.

Because the money is doing different jobs before and after you stop working. While building the corpus a longer horizon allows more exposure; once you are drawing from it monthly, a poor stretch damages the corpus permanently, so most households hold it more conservatively. Using one rate for both stages overstates what is realistic.

Yes, as existing savings earmarked for retirement, since they are building towards the same purpose. Remember that NPS is largely locked until retirement age and part of the corpus must be annuitised at exit, so what is available as a lump sum differs from the balance shown.

Use one that reflects what your household actually spends on rather than a headline figure. Medical costs in particular tend to rise faster and form a larger share of spending as you get older. Running the calculation at a higher inflation figure is a useful stress test.

That is worth knowing now rather than at 55. The realistic levers are a later retirement date, a higher instalment stepped up with income, working part-time in the early retirement years, or planning for lower expenses. A number that looks impossible usually means one of those has to move.

No. Every figure here follows from assumptions you supplied, and market-linked returns are neither steady nor promised. Run it again at a lower return and a higher inflation figure, and plan around the harsher of the two answers.

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