The FIRE Calculator,
built for India.

The 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study (1998), which used US market data over a 30-year retirement window. Two reasons it doesn't apply directly to India:

1. Higher inflation, higher real-return volatility. Indian inflation has averaged 6-7% over decades versus 2-3% in the US, and our equity returns, while higher in nominal terms, carry more sequence-of-returns risk in the early-retirement window.

2. Longer retirement horizons for early retirees.If you retire at 50 instead of 65, your retirement is 35-40 years, not 30. The Trinity 4% number drops to roughly 3.0-3.5% for these horizons. Karsten Jeske's ERN (Early Retirement Now) series remains the most rigorous public work on this. We default to 3.5% as the honest middle ground.

Indian education inflation has averaged 10-12% per year over the last two decades — roughly double general CPI. For each child, we add an education corpus of ₹40L in today's money (a reasonable Indian university number, conservative for foreign), inflated by your chosen education inflation rate to the year the child turns 18. This corpus is added to your FI target, not subtracted from your portfolio. The implicit assumption: education is funded from the FI corpus or ahead of it.

Indian household healthcare costs are bimodal. Pre-60, regular insurance covers most of it and the wedge is small. Post-60, premiums spike or coverage disappears (most insurers cap fresh issuance at 65, and pre-existing conditions become unfundable), and direct medical costs become the single largest variable line item. We model an 8% wedge starting at 60, growing at the healthcare inflation rate. Skip it in expert mode if you have employer or guaranteed coverage that you're confident extends into retirement.

The 2024 Union Budget reset long-term capital gains on equity to 12.5% above an annual ₹1.25L exemption per person, with indexation removed for most asset classes. For a corpus held 25+ years, roughly 80% of the value is gains. During retirement withdrawal, the gain portion of every withdrawal is taxed. The effective drag on a 30-year retirement using equity for withdrawals is approximately 7-8% of the gross corpus — meaning your "real" usable corpus is ~92% of the headline number. We apply this drag by default; you can disable it in expert mode if your corpus is held in tax-free vehicles only (PPF, EEE structures).

Coast FIRE is the corpus you'd need today such that, even if you stopped contributing entirely, compounding alone would carry it to your FI number by your retirement age. It is the single most underrated number in personal finance.

Why it matters: most people think they have to keep saving aggressively until they hit FI. Coast FIRE shows you the much closer milestone — the point after which you no longer need to save aggressively. After Coast, you can shift to a lower-stress career, work part-time, or take a sabbatical, because the corpus is already on autopilot. Most users have never seen this number for themselves.

Honesty about limits matters. This calculator does not model: portfolio rebalancing drag, asset allocation changes over time, real estate as an investment asset, business equity, ESOPs, foreign assets, currency exposure, or detailed individual tax positions. It assumes a generic equity-heavy growth portfolio with the return you specify. For situations more complex than the eight factors above, the calculator's output is directional, not prescriptive.