Calculate your retirement corpus needed and how much to save every month.
Retirement planning is the process of determining retirement income goals and the actions needed to achieve them. Without adequate planning, many people outlive their savings. With increasing life expectancy, you may spend 25-30 years in retirement. Our retirement calculator helps you understand how much you need to save today to enjoy a comfortable retirement tomorrow.
A common guideline is to save 25 times your annual retirement expenses (based on the 4% withdrawal rule). If you need a given amount per year in retirement, multiplying that by 25 gives your target total savings. This ensures your portfolio lasts 30+ years with a 4% annual withdrawal rate, based on historical market returns.
If you start saving a fixed monthly amount at age 25 with 10% annual returns, you can end up with roughly 3 times more total savings by age 60 than someone who starts the same monthly amount at age 35. This dramatic difference demonstrates the extraordinary power of compound interest over time. Start investing for retirement as early as possible.
The specific names, tax rules, and contribution limits for these vehicles vary significantly by country, so check what's available through your employer and local financial institutions.
Starting too late is the biggest mistake. Not accounting for inflation is another — a fixed amount today will have significantly less purchasing power decades from now at typical inflation rates. Underestimating healthcare costs in retirement is common. Withdrawing retirement savings early for other expenses destroys the compounding effect. Use our retirement planning calculator annually to stay on track.
Estimating how much money is needed for retirement typically starts with projecting annual expenses in retirement, then working backward to calculate the total nest egg required to sustainably support those expenses over an expected retirement lifespan without running out of money. A commonly cited guideline, the "4% rule," suggests that withdrawing 4% of a retirement portfolio's value in the first year, then adjusting that dollar amount for inflation each subsequent year, has historically had a strong track record of lasting at least 30 years without depleting the portfolio.
This guideline has faced legitimate criticism and refinement over time, since it was based on historical US market data that may not perfectly predict future market conditions, and individual circumstances (health, other income sources, desired legacy) significantly affect what withdrawal rate is actually appropriate for a specific person's situation.
A complete retirement calculation needs to account for other expected income sources beyond personal savings, including Social Security, pensions, rental income, or part-time work, since these reduce the amount that needs to be withdrawn from personal retirement savings each year. Underestimating these supplemental income sources can lead to unnecessarily conservative savings targets, while overestimating them can lead to a genuinely risky retirement shortfall.
Due to compounding, someone who starts saving for retirement in their 20s can accumulate significantly more wealth by retirement age than someone who starts a decade later, even if the later starter contributes more money in total. This makes starting early, even with small amounts, one of the single most impactful decisions in long-term retirement planning — more impactful, in many cases, than the specific investment choices made along the way.
A retirement calculator helps you estimate how much money you need to save to retire comfortably based on your age, income, and expenses.
Most experts recommend saving at least 15% of your income for retirement. The earlier you start, the less you need to save each month.
The 4% rule suggests you can withdraw 4% of your retirement savings each year without running out of money over a 30-year retirement.
The best time to start is now. Starting early allows compound interest to grow your savings significantly over time.
