SWP calculator
See how long a corpus lasts when you draw a monthly income from it, and the withdrawal it can sustain indefinitely — the core arithmetic of living off your investments.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere. Educational only, and not investment advice.
How to use this calculator
Each step names a control you will find on screen above.
- Corpus
The pot you are drawing from — a retirement corpus, or the mutual fund holding you have set a withdrawal on.
- Monthly withdrawal
What you want to take out each month. The calculator raises this each year for inflation, because a fixed rupee amount buys less over a retirement that can last decades.
- Expected annual return
What the remaining corpus earns while you draw from it. Be conservative — a retirement corpus is usually invested more cautiously than one still growing, and the sequence of returns matters as much as the average.
- Raise withdrawal each year (inflation)
The rate your withdrawal grows to keep its purchasing power. Setting this to zero shows the flattering, unrealistic case; a real plan has to survive inflation.
- Read “corpus lasts” against “sustainable / month”
The first is how many years your chosen withdrawal survives; the second is the amount the corpus earns each month, which it could fund almost indefinitely before inflation. The gap between them is the warning.
Worked example: Drawing ₹50,000 a month from ₹1 crore
A ₹1 crore corpus earning 9% a year, with a ₹50,000 monthly withdrawal that rises 6% a year for inflation.
What to enter
- Corpus
- ₹1,00,00,000
- Monthly withdrawal
- ₹50,000
- Expected annual return
- 9%
- Raise withdrawal each year (inflation)
- 6%
What it shows you
- Corpus lasts
- ≈ 23–24 years
- Sustainable / month
- ≈ ₹72,000
- First-year withdrawal
- ₹6,00,000
23 years 6 months
roughly one month’s 9% growth
6% of the corpus
Where this is taught
A calculator gives you a number. These explain what the number means and when it misleads you.
- Market Basics12 minAnnuities, NPS at sixty, and turning a corpus into an incomeBuilding the corpus is the part everyone plans for. Converting it into forty years of monthly income is the part almost nobody does — and the default option is rarely the best one.
- Risk & Psychology13 minDoes a long horizon actually remove risk?Time narrows the spread of the annualised return and widens the spread of the rupees you end up with. Those are two different claims in one sentence.
- Market Basics12 minEPF, PPF and NPS: the accounts that quietly do the workThe three retirement accounts most Indians already hold, what each actually returns, how they are taxed, and where they should sit in an allocation.
- Risk & Psychology11 minInvesting through life stagesWhat changes between 25 and 65 is not the market — it is your horizon, your income and your ability to recover.
- Risk & Psychology12 minStarting at forty-fiveEvery compounding chart is drawn for someone who began at twenty-five, and it is discouraging by design. What actually changes when you have twenty years rather than forty.