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How much corpus you need, and the monthly SIP to get there
Counter-intuitive heads-up: a lower SWR is more conservative and means you need a bigger corpus. See the water-tank diagram below for why.
You need a corpus of
₹8.62 Cr
by age 60 to maintain today's lifestyle, adjusted for 6% yearly inflation.
Monthly SIP needed
₹22,709
for 30 years at 12% expected return.
Blue line = how your savings grow. Dashed line = the corpus you need.
Think of your retirement corpus as a water tank, and your annual expenses as a tap that drains it at a fixed rate. The Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR)is how fast you're willing to drain the tank — a smaller percentage means a slower drain, which means the tank can be smaller and still last forever, right? Wrong.It's the opposite. The slower you want to drain, the bigger the tank you need.
Here's why: the tank isn't draining toward empty. It's also being refilled by investment returns. A bigger tank produces more rupees of return per year — so you can afford to drain a smaller % of it and still cover your expenses. With a tiny tank, the returns are tiny too, so you'd have to drain a much larger % of it, which is risky.
The math, in one line: Corpus = Annual expense ÷ SWR. At ₹12L/year expense: 4% SWR needs ₹3 crore; 3% SWR needs ₹4 crore; 5% SWR "needs" ₹2.4 crore but is much riskier through bad market sequences.
SWR
Corpus needed
₹11.49 Cr
to safely drain ₹34.46 L/year
SWR
Corpus needed
₹8.62 Cr
to safely drain ₹34.46 L/year
SWR
Corpus needed
₹6.89 Cr
to safely drain ₹34.46 L/year
The hidden assumption
The SWR rule only works if your post-retirement portfolio earns at least SWR + inflationon average. If you keep retirement money in a 6.5% FD while inflation runs at 6%, the corpus shrinks in real terms and even a 3% SWR can fail over 30+ years. Stay invested in a balanced equity-debt mix; don't flee to FDs the day you retire.
This is a FIRE-style retirement calculator— Financial Independence, Retire Early. The core idea: you're "financially independent" when your corpus can sustain your lifestyle indefinitely from its returns alone, without you needing to earn.
The famous 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study (1998), which showed that withdrawing 4% of a portfolio per year had a high probability of lasting 30+ years. For India, with higher inflation but also higher equity returns, many planners use 3.5–5% as a safer range. Adjust the slider above based on your risk tolerance.
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Why lower SWR requires a bigger corpus, the water tank analogy, inflation-adjusted retirement models, and a worked ₹12L cash-flow example.