How much is enough to retire?Retirement calculator: the corpus you may need, and the SIP for it.

How to use the retirement calculator

1. Enter your age today, the age you plan to retire at, and your household’s monthly expenses today.
2. Add the inflation you expect, how many years the money should last after you retire, and any savings already set aside for retirement.
3. Choose an expected return before retirement and a lower, steadier one after it. Then see your corpus and the monthly SIP needed.

How to read your result

Monthly expenses at retirement show what inflation does over time. For example, ₹25,000 a month today becomes about ₹1.07 lakh a month in 25 years at 6% inflation.

Corpus needed is the amount you may want ready on the day you retire. It’s meant to last all your retirement years, while expenses keep rising and the remaining money keeps earning. Monthly SIP needed is what you may invest from today to build it, after counting your existing savings.

This is a simple estimate. It doesn’t count pensions, rent income or big medical bills, and mutual fund returns are market-linked, not guaranteed. Keep health insurance in place so a hospital bill doesn’t eat into your corpus, and see how we approach retirement planning.

How the retirement calculator works

It works in three steps. First, today’s expenses grow with inflation until you retire. Next, it finds the corpus that, while earning the after-retirement return, can pay those expenses every year as they keep rising, for all your retirement years. Last, it subtracts what your existing savings may grow to and finds the monthly SIP for the rest. E is the monthly expense at retirement, Y is years to retirement, f is inflation, N is years in retirement, r1 and r2 are the returns before and after retirement, S is your savings, i is r1 ÷ 12 and n is months to retirement.

E = today’s monthly expenses × (1 + f)^Y; Corpus = the amount that, earning r2, can pay 12 × E a year, rising by f each year, for N years; SIP = (Corpus − S × (1 + r1)^Y) ÷ (({[1 + i]^n − 1} ÷ i) × (1 + i))