About planMyFIRE
Who we are
I'm Ankita. I taught mathematics for several years, first in schools and then at college level, and I have a master's in engineering. In 2019, before covid, my husband and I started planning our own early retirement. We are close to it now.
The "we" on this site is the two of us, and nobody else. He works at a tech product company. Most of the calculators were his idea, because we needed that particular answer at that particular point in our own planning. I write the articles. We go through them together before anything is published, mainly to catch places where a reader could be misled.
Why we built this
Every FIRE calculator we could find in 2019 was written for Americans. Four percent withdrawal, 401(k) accounts, Social Security sitting underneath the whole plan as a floor. None of that survives contact with Indian numbers. Our inflation runs closer to 6%. There is no government pension arriving at 62. EPF, PPF and NPS behave nothing like the accounts those tools assume you hold.
So we built our own in a spreadsheet. Then a second one, when we realised knowing the target corpus told us nothing about whether it would survive thirty years of withdrawals. Then a few more. The tools / calculators on this site are those spreadsheets and math, cleaned up and put on the web as calculators and formatted spreadsheets for ease of use. Every one of them exists because we needed the answer ourselves somewhere between 2019 and now, and it seemed silly to keep them to ourselves.
We plan around Bengaluru, which is where we live. That is a limitation and we should say it plainly: the numbers these calculators pre-fill are a Bengaluru household's numbers. If you are planning around Indore or Kochi or Coimbatore, your expenses should be lower than what loads by default, and you should change them.
What's on the site
- FIRE Number Calculator - how much corpus you need, adjusted for Indian inflation and SWR
- SWP Sustainability Calculator - will the corpus actually last? Year by year depletion
- Compound Interest Calculator - growth over time, with step-up contributions
- Portfolio Rebalancing Calculator - drift detection and what to actually sell
- FIRE Readiness Quiz - twelve questions, a rough scorecard
- Articles - EPF vs PPF vs NPS, health insurance before 60, SWP vs FD, and the rest
Our assumptions
Every calculator here runs on the same short list of defaults: 6% inflation, a 3.3% withdrawal rate, 12% from equity and 7% from debt. These are defaults, not predictions. Twelve percent is what the Nifty has done historically and it is not owed to anyone going forward. You can change every one of them inside the calculators.
Rather than repeat the reasoning on every page, we have put all of it in one place. The methodology page has the full table with sources, the exact formulas the calculators use, why we landed on 3.3% instead of the American 4%, and a list of the things these tools do not model at all.
How this is written
Worth being upfront about this. The ideas and the opinions here are ours, and the calculators run on our own maths. I use an AI assistant to help with the writing, mostly to tighten clumsy sentences and cut repetition as well as formatting the content.
Some of this will go stale
Indian tax rules, EPF limits and LTCG thresholds move with every Union Budget. We try to keep up, but this is two people doing it around their actual jobs, and some pages will lag behind the current rules. Please check the rule as it stands today before you act on anything you read here. Don't treat a number on this site as current just because it is published.
If you spot something out of date or plain wrong, please tell us. We would rather fix it than defend it.
What we are not
Neither of us is a SEBI-registered Investment Adviser, and planMyFIRE is not an advisory service. Teaching mathematics means I can show you where a number comes from and why the formula is built that way. It does not mean I know what you should do with your money. Your tax situation, your family obligations, your job security and your appetite for a bad market year are all things I know nothing about.
Everything here is informational and educational. Treat the outputs as a starting point for a conversation with a SEBI-registered adviser, not as a substitute for one. This is one household's arithmetic, shared openly. It is not a plan for yours.
Contact
Questions, feedback, or corrections? Visit our contact page or email hello@planmyfire.in directly.