FIRE Calculator 2026 (Financial Independence, Retire Early)

FIRE means building a corpus large enough that its returns cover your living expenses, making work optional. The standard target is 25× your annual expenses, derived from a 4% safe withdrawal rate.

It says you can withdraw 4% of your corpus in year one and raise that rupee amount with inflation each year, with a high chance the money outlasts 30 years. It comes from US market history; for India, 3%–3.5% is the more defensible assumption given higher inflation.

Lean FIRE covers a minimal lifestyle (roughly 20× expenses). Regular FIRE targets your current lifestyle at 25×. Fat FIRE funds a significantly upgraded lifestyle at 33× or more. Coast FIRE means you have invested enough early that it grows to your target by 60 without further contributions.

Plan on 25 to 30 times your annual expenses in your retirement year, sitting at the upper end because retiring early means the money must last longer. At Rs 1,00,000 of monthly expenses today and 6% inflation, expenses 15 years out are about Rs 2.4 lakh a month, or Rs 28.8 lakh a year — so roughly Rs 7.2 crore to Rs 8.6 crore, not the Rs 3 crore that today's expense figure suggests.

This is the part that breaks most early retirement plans. Buy a personal floater well before you quit so the 2 to 4 year waiting periods for pre-existing conditions are already served, and add a super top-up of Rs 25 lakh, which is inexpensive at a Rs 5 lakh deductible. Budget for premiums that roughly double every 10 years as you age, and keep a separate medical reserve outside the corpus for what the policy declines.

Redeeming equity funds gives long-term capital gains taxed at 12.5% above Rs 1.25 lakh of gains a year, so staggering redemptions across financial years uses that exemption twice. Sequence risk is the danger of a market fall in your first few retired years: selling units at depressed prices permanently shrinks the corpus. Hold 3 to 5 years of expenses in debt so you never have to sell equity into a falling market.