Methodology
Know what the model knows—and what it does not.
A useful financial tool should expose its assumptions, sources, and limitations. This page documents the current public version of each calculation.
These tools are educational models. They do not know your tax residency, complete asset allocation, health, liabilities, insurance, family obligations, or behavioural response to stress.
FIRE Planner
Inputs and units
Portfolio, contributions, retirement spending, and retirement income are entered in today’s purchasing power. The display can use Indian or international number formatting, but changing the display unit does not perform a currency conversion.
Real-return conversion
Each simulated nominal return is reduced by the combined fee and tax-drag assumption, then converted to a real return using the inflation assumption. The model uses:
Real return = (1 + sampled nominal return − cost drag) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1
Return paths
Annual nominal returns are sampled from a normal distribution using the selected mean and volatility. Individual annual draws are limited to −90% and +125% to prevent impossible values from dominating a path. The model uses a deterministic seeded random-number generator so the same inputs and seed reproduce the same result.
Normal distributions understate fat tails, volatility clustering, changing correlations, and regime shifts. The output should therefore be read as a sensitivity exercise—not a forecast of market probabilities.
Accumulation and retirement
Before retirement, the model applies one simulated annual return and then adds the year’s real contribution. Contributions can rise or fall by a selected real percentage. During retirement, it applies one simulated annual return and subtracts retirement spending net of recurring income.
Spending policies
- Fixed real: maintains the same purchasing-power spending throughout retirement.
- Adaptive guardrails: reduces spending by 10% when the current withdrawal rate rises 20% above its starting level, and increases spending by 5% when it falls 20% below. Reductions cannot take spending below the user-selected floor, and recoveries cannot take it above the original real spending plan. The result reports the median and 10th-percentile minimum spending retained across simulated paths. This is a simplified policy, not a complete implementation of any named academic rule.
Required corpus
The planner repeatedly tests different starting retirement amounts against the same return paths. A binary search finds the approximate smallest corpus that meets the selected retirement confidence target.
Plan confidence
A path succeeds when the portfolio remains above zero through the selected plan age. Success probability is the proportion of simulated paths that succeed. It does not measure lifestyle satisfaction, estate value, or the probability that the assumptions themselves are correct.
Important omissions
The current model does not include asset-class correlations, separate tax lots, detailed Indian tax rules, insurance, healthcare shocks, inheritance, property, changing inflation regimes, or dynamic asset allocation. Model these outside the tool or consult a qualified professional when they are material.
Wealth Context
The tool compares net worth with a visible reference median and reports a broad multiple. It does not calculate an exact percentile.
Published USD-equivalent market medians come from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026. UBS describes wealth per adult and covers selected markets; the values may not represent households, investable assets, peer groups, or local purchasing power.
The India default is explicitly illustrative and editable because this implementation does not claim a precise current median from the UBS summary table. Users should replace it with a benchmark appropriate to their source and definition.
The optional age adjustment is a simple planning heuristic and is not part of UBS data. It scales the reference median by 0.55 below age 30, 0.80 from 30–39, 1.00 from 40–49, 1.20 from 50–59, and 1.35 from age 60. It is off by default.
Projection
Future wealth compounds current net worth at the selected real return and adds annual saving as an end-of-year annuity. It assumes stable annual saving and return, with no taxes, volatility, withdrawals, or life events.
Indian Stock Screen Builder
Preset conditions are transparent filters designed to create a research list. They combine multi-year profitability, growth, balance-sheet, and valuation measures. Thresholds are judgement calls, not proven cut-offs.
Third-party field names may change. A company passing a screen may still have poor governance, weak cash conversion, customer concentration, cyclicality, accounting risk, or an unattractive valuation. The generated output is never a recommendation.
Privacy and computation
All calculator logic runs in the browser. No financial input is sent to this website. Theme preference and optional FIRE scenarios are stored in browser local storage on the user’s device. External sites receive normal browser request information only when a visitor follows an external link.
Testing and updates
Calculation code is versioned with the website. Material changes to formulas, sources, or assumptions should update this page and its date. Results should be tested against known edge cases before each deployment.