FIRE calculator India: your FIRE number and the age you can retire

Take your yearly spending, inflate it to the year you want to retire, and divide by the share you plan to withdraw each year. With ₹60,000 a month of spending and a 3.5% withdrawal rate, the FIRE number is ₹7.2 lakh ÷ 0.035, about ₹2.06 crore in today's money. This calculator does the inflation step for you and shows the number at your target age.

The 4% rule comes from US studies (Bengen in 1994, the Trinity study in 1998) of 30-year retirements: about 4% survived the worst US starting year. Someone retiring at 40 may need the money for 50 years, and Indian market history is shorter and more volatile, so some Indian FIRE writers suggest 3% to 3.5%. That is a convention, not a standard. Our safe withdrawal rate guide shows the trade-off.

It depends almost entirely on your spending. At ₹60,000 a month today, 6% inflation and a 3.5% withdrawal rate, you need about ₹2.06 crore in today's money, which is about ₹4.9 crore in the rupees of 15 years from now. Double the spending and the number doubles. Enter your own spending and target age to see your figure and the gap.

Count them, but check when you can use them. After leaving a job you can take up to 75% of your EPF straight away and the rest after 12 months without work; full withdrawal comes on retirement after 55. PPF has a 15-year lock-in with limited withdrawals from year 7. Leaving NPS before 60 means at least 80% must buy an annuity. If most of your corpus is locked up, keep enough in funds or deposits to bridge the gap.

Treat healthcare separately from everyday spending. Medical costs in India have tended to rise faster than general inflation, and early retirees lose employer health cover. Most FIRE planners buy a personal family floater plus a top-up policy while they are still healthy, and keep a separate medical buffer. Adding the premiums to your monthly spending here gives a more honest FIRE number.

Lean and Fat FIRE use the same maths with a different budget: frugal for a smaller, sooner target, generous for more cushion. Barista FIRE assumes part-time income pays some costs and sizes the corpus to last to an age instead of using a withdrawal rate. Coast FIRE reuses the FIRE number but asks whether today's investments alone will grow into it by retirement.

Not directly. It treats the return you enter as what your investments earn after costs, and the FIRE number as money you can spend. In practice, capital-gains tax on mutual fund withdrawals and tax on interest reduce what you can spend. A simple allowance is to enter a slightly lower return, or a slightly higher monthly spending, to cover tax.