How much do you actually need to retire in India?

The FIRE-community shorthand — save 25 times your annual expenses — is a reasonable back-of-envelope target. But it quietly assumes a withdrawal rate and a time horizon that may not fit an Indian retirement, where healthcare costs, family obligations, and inflation on essentials tend to run higher than the US-derived studies the rule comes from.

Two numbers matter more than the multiple itself: how long the corpus needs to last (a 35-year-old retiring early needs a very different number than a 60-year-old with a pension), and what inflation does to healthcare specifically, which has historically outpaced general CPI in India by a meaningful margin.

Our approach: build the retirement number backward from a realistic monthly expense estimate at retirement age (not today's expenses), assume a real return of 2-3% after inflation on the retirement corpus itself, and stress-test it against a longer lifespan than you expect. Better to overshoot the number than to run out of runway at 78.