What is Retirement Corpus?
Background
Your retirement corpus is the total amount of savings and investments you have (or will have) when you stop earning a regular salary — typically EPF, NPS, PPF, equity mutual funds, and fixed deposits added together. That corpus must fund every year of your expenses after retirement, keep pace with inflation, and in most cases last 25-35 years without running out. It is different from a single account balance: it's the combined, working total across all your retirement instruments.
Explanation
In India, planners generally use a rule of thumb of 33X–40X your annual expenses, notably higher than the 25X figure common in US retirement writing. The gap exists because Indian retirees face structurally higher inflation (historically 6–7% vs. 2–3% in the US), medical costs rising even faster at 12–15% a year, and no state pension safety net equivalent to Social Security. The multiplier comes directly from your withdrawal rate: a 3% withdrawal rate implies roughly 33X expenses, 2.5% implies 40X, and the traditional US 4% rule implies 25X. So for ₹1 crore of corpus, a 3% withdrawal gives ₹25,000/month, a 2.5% withdrawal gives ₹20,833/month, and a 2% withdrawal (used for extra-safe or Fat FIRE plans) gives ₹16,667/month — the same corpus, three different sustainable incomes depending on how conservative you want to be. Tools like Monte Carlo simulation (running thousands of market scenarios) test whether a given corpus actually survives a full retirement rather than relying on a single average-return assumption.
Example
A 30-year-old planning to retire at 60, investing steadily for 30 years at a blended 10% return, reaches roughly: ₹2.3 crore corpus from a ₹10,000/month investment, ₹5.7 crore from ₹25,000/month, or ₹11.4 crore from ₹50,000/month. At a 3% withdrawal rate those corpuses sustain monthly pensions of about ₹57,000, ₹1.4 lakh, and ₹2.85 lakh respectively. An equity-heavy SIP compounding at 12% does even better: ₹5,000/month for 30 years builds ₹1.76 crore (₹58,700/month at 4% withdrawal), and ₹20,000/month builds ₹7.05 crore (₹2.35 lakh/month). Use the full Retirement Planner to combine your own EPF, NPS, and SIP numbers into a personalised corpus target, or see withdrawal rate and FIRE for how the multiplier and early-retirement math connect. If you're targeting retirement well before 60, the FIRE Calculator computes this same corpus target directly from your expenses, with Lean/Coast/Standard/Fat variants.
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