- How much your core SIP investment grows to by your target retirement age
- What a parallel PPF contribution adds, tax-free and market-risk-free
- How much pension and lump sum your NPS contributions could provide
- How long your retirement corpus actually lasts once you start withdrawing from it
- What your current expenses will really cost after years of inflation
What you'll figure out
Step preview
1
How much will your SIP grow to?
Start with your core retirement investment
2
What about a safer PPF contribution?
See what a government-backed, tax-free option adds
3
How much pension can NPS give you?
Model your National Pension System contributions
4
How long will your retirement corpus last?
Model withdrawing from your corpus after you retire
5
What will your expenses actually cost by then?
Adjust today's expenses for inflation over your time horizon
Start Journey →
Takes about 15 min · Save anytime
Most retirement planning stops at "how much will my SIP grow to?" — a single number that ignores everything else that actually funds a retirement in India: PPF, NPS, and, most importantly, how long that money needs to last once you stop earning. This journey walks through all of it in one flow, ending with the question almost nobody asks until it's too late: what will your expenses actually cost by the time you get there?
Who this is for
- Anyone in their 20s to 40s building a retirement plan from scratch
- People already investing in SIP, PPF, or NPS who want to see how the pieces fit together
- Retirees or near-retirees who want to stress-test how long their corpus will last
Related journeys
Frequently Asked Questions
About 15 minutes. You can pause and resume anytime within the same browser session, and each step is saved as you go.
No — most people use a mix, and this journey is built to show what each contributes on its own so you can decide the split that suits you. Someone leaning on employer NPS contributions might rely less on SIP, and vice versa.
The prefill uses your SIP total as a starting point since it's usually the largest single number in a typical retirement mix, but the initial corpus field is editable — add your PPF maturity amount and NPS lump sum to it manually if you want to model your full combined corpus.
No. Everything stays in your browser's session storage and clears when you close the tab. Nothing is sent to thecalcu.com's servers.
Yes. Go back to any step, change a value, and steps that pulled data from it get flagged as needing a recalculation, both on that step and on the summary page.
NPS contributions typically come from both you and your employer, often step up over time, and split into a lump sum plus a mandatory annuity at retirement — the extra fields capture that structure accurately instead of oversimplifying it.
You can still run the step to see what NPS would add, or skip straight to the SWP step using just your SIP and PPF numbers — each step in this journey works independently.
It's only as accurate as the inflation rate you enter, which is an assumption, not a guarantee. Try running the last step at a couple of different rates (say 5% and 8%) to see how sensitive your retirement target is to that assumption.
It shows what happens to your corpus if you withdraw a fixed (or rising) amount every month during retirement, factoring in the returns the remaining corpus keeps earning. The remaining corpus figure tells you whether you're on track to outlast your money or run out early.
Check the summary page for all five results side by side, then compare your projected SWP monthly withdrawal against the inflation-adjusted expense from the last step — that comparison is the real test of whether your retirement plan actually holds up.
Free calculators used in this journey