Plain answers to the questions people ask before working out their number.
Take what you spend each month today, grow it by inflation up to the age you want to stop working, multiply by 12, then divide by your safe withdrawal rate. Someone spending ₹75,000 a month today, retiring in 15 years with 6% inflation and a 3.5% withdrawal rate, needs roughly ₹6.2 crore. The calculator above does this arithmetic for your own numbers.
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It is the point where your invested savings are large enough to cover your living costs without a salary. The FIRE number, or corpus, is the size that pot needs to be on the day you stop working.
The well-known 4% rule comes from US market data over 30-year retirements. Indian inflation has historically run higher, and retiring at 45 or 50 can mean funding 40 years or more. A rate between 3% and 3.5% is a more conservative starting point here. Dropping from 4% to 3.5% raises the corpus you need by about 14%.
When you sell equity mutual fund units to fund your living costs, long-term capital gains are taxed at 12.5% on gains above ₹1.25 lakh in a financial year. Debt fund gains are taxed at your income tax slab rate. Most free calculators ignore this entirely, which understates the corpus you actually need.
A great deal, because it compounds. At 6% inflation, ₹50,000 of monthly spending today becomes about ₹1.2 lakh in 15 years. Your corpus has to fund the future cost of your life, not today's cost, which is why a calculator that skips inflation will always flatter you.
Not the home you live in. It produces no income and you still need somewhere to live. A second property is different: if you genuinely intend to sell it, enter the expected sale value and the age you plan to sell, and it will be counted from that point onward.
Under current EPFO rules you can withdraw a large share of your balance after leaving employment, with the remainder available after a further period without a job. The waiting period changed under recent reforms, so check the EPFO member portal for the position that applies to you. If you plan instead to leave the money until 58, enter it as a future lumpsum at that age.
NPS Tier I is locked until 60. At maturity only 60% comes to you as a lump sum, and the remaining 40% must be used to buy an annuity. If you intend to stop working well before 60, NPS cannot fund the years in between, so it belongs in your plan as money arriving at 60, not as savings available on day one.
FirePath is a free educational calculator. It is not investment advice and we are not a SEBI-registered investment adviser. Figures are estimates based on the assumptions you enter.